Underpainting with partial painting

I recently gave a demonstration for the Falmouth Art Guild, where I’ll give a workshop next summer. The demo was of a house in New Mexico–not a subject I’m terribly familiar with! My original choice for the demo was this scene from Great Falls on the C&O Canal.  It has a lot of detail, however, and I was afraid that it wouldn’t be a very good demo. So I used it this week when giving a one day tutorial. This was as far as I got. I couldn’t sleep this morning, so i decided to get up and finish it! The tutorial was about underpainting. I chose to do a big shape block in that encomapssed the trees and reflections in the water. But I left my drawing of the lock without underpainting, so as not to lose the small details. I debated whethe to just focus on water and add the shapes of lighter pon scum later, but decided the shape was key to the picture and gave it a separate color for the underpainting. For the dark area of trees, I began with a dark violet NuPastel. Then added warmer, lighter red violets, along with some oranges and browns in the trees to left. The dark area looks pretty flat at this point. I began with the building and falls (this isn’t the “great falls”–this is a really “little” falls!), which are the center of interest. I used various pale, cool green Giraults for the water initially, to tie it to the greenery around it. Then added a little yellow to spark it up.