I was able to knock out about 6 paintings of the flatirons on this day, some are definitely the kinds of paintings to take back to the studio and work on a bit more. Others were very good, in my opinion, for having been made on the spot. Not every plein air painting is perfect, yet it is always nice if a few of them are.
Lately I’ve been painting with gouache, which has been transformationally easier to do than painting outdoors with oil paint. Oil paint is tough to paint outdoors with because usually you have to have turpentine or makeup wipes to clean brushes. Turpentine is terrible, almost nothing will make turpentine better. That is why using the makeup wipes seems better to me for oil paint.
But that doesn’t matter in these photos since I’m using gouache! Gouache is so nice because it is such a bright paint, and, it dries fast! Painting with gouache is a lot like drawing. It’s also very easy to layer and add different colors on top of one another.
Lessons I learn from plein air painting:
1. Planning - Where does everything go? In what order should I paint which colors? Blue is a stronger color than yellow, so I should probably paint the sky first, and then the middle ground, and finally the foreground.
2. Chaos Management - The wind might come up and throw a bunch of dirt on the canvas. Bugs might get stuck in the paint. Bees are attracted to bright colors so painting can involve a lot of hornet and bee encounters.
3. Communication - What does the painting say? What does it fail to say?
In other art efforts, I sprinted to get some abstract patterns done and uploaded to Society6 and also the POD service running on this website. I laid down quite a few swatches of gouache on yupo paper and uploaded the designs to Society6. Here are some of the swatches: