Wow! What a great day to Plein Air!

Today, I went over to downtown Antioch to join my plein air group. But only found one person sitting on the main drag set up for our 3 hour session. So, I opened my chair and set myself up just up the street and started painting one of the shops there. There were two big beautiful trees and a blue sky that attracted my attention. The shop was a dog grooming place and that too attracted me. So, here is the painting that I did.

Several people came up to me, including a policewoman and wanted to see my work. Another wanted to know if I did commissions and if I could work off a photo. So, maybe I will get a call and paint the jewelery store building for her.

There were so many interesting buildings, I could go back there and capture many interesting street scenes there, because of the very old and unique storefronts.

Janet's Garden

Thought I try a fun painting of my friend Janet's garden. I painted it on Canson rough paper, 15 x 20. I used mostly watercolor, but started with some green gouache.

For those who do not know what gouache is, it's an opaque watercolor. Regular watercolor is transparent and you sometimes loose the colors as they dry into the paper. With the opaque, you can lay on the color and it dries pretty much like what you put on. So for this one, it helped with all the foliage.

Second in Chinese Series

This was very fun to paint. I did it on a small 5x7 piece of watercolor Arches 140 lb paper in all gouache. I think I want to make this bigger, but here is what I did today. I am calling this Chinese Soup Kitchen. Kirsten, hope you like this one! I just loved the photo and thought it would make a great painting. What do you think?

Lots of Good Photo Ops

Well, my trip to Washington DC is over and done and I was able to see so many places. I went to four Smithsonian's, two of them art museums. I saw a fantastic exhibit at the Historical Society, Lily Sandorf, she was a watercolor, gouache and ink artist who captured street scenes of Washington DC in the 60's before the buildings were demolished. This was a treat to see. I also visited the US Botanic Gardens near the Capital Building. What a beautiful place to see. I took many pictures there of some gorgeous flowers. Here is one of them I captured in a pastel painting. It is 12 x 16 in size and was done on paper.