Fog and Poppies, 12″ x 24″, Rives with Golden Fine Pumice Gel

On Friday I went to the studio and did a relatively fast painting in a 12 x 24 format, the first I’ve done from this series.  I was intrigued with the idea of fog, despite the fact that there was no fog.  But then, I did grow up on the coast!

I used my typical warm surface but this one was lighter, knowing that the overall values would be lighter.  I started with some hard pastel to lay out the bushes and trees, then moved to soft.  For the sky, I focused on violets and blues to handle the idea of fog.  It would probably be lighter than this, but I liked it.  But, of course, I wanted a little light in there that could shine on the water so I added in a little hint of yellow.  I found it really fun to loosely add the lighter colors over the tree/bushes at left.

I think that this composition worked well with the long, narrow shape.  I envisioned a hill on the far right and liked that idea.  I initially used a warm color for the grasses, then added a whited green on over.  For the bushes, I used darker greens then grayed whitish cool and warm greens (Ludwigs) and that worked relaly nicely.  In the bushes at the bottom, I added some yellow greens as these were closer and would have more color in them.  After doing the grasses and bushes, I had a lot of muted cool colors and I decide I needed oranges.  So the Rehoboth Bay was suddenly decorated with California poppies!!!  I decided I’d better not call this “Rehoboth Bay”  (it IS Rehoboth, not Delaware Bay as I’ve called previous studies).

I now have two 18 x 18s and one 12 x 24.  I tried to do another 18 x 18 today but don’t like it much.  So perhaps I’ve exhausted this subject for awhile.  I have three studies and three paintings that I would frame from this.  I’d like to move on to a new subject with some different elements from the Columbia River trip last October.  I will be having a show in March 2023 that I think I will call “Intuiting the Landscape”.  I want to include studies as well as the paintings.  I may move to something with buildings but for now I think I’ll stick to pure landscape.