While the Deer Were Grazing. . .

. . . I was actually painting.

The canvas was finally covered, with good detail in the rock faces. (Not real faces—it is just the way to clarify that I am talking about vertical rocks rather than basic boulders.) I didn’t try to match the scene line for line or space for space. It already is taking w a a a y t o o l o n g. So, I just tried to capture the feel of the place.

The gully/ravine/drop off behind the bank of flowers wasn’t looking separate enough so I darkened the edge. There are still many details to perfect on this painting, but I need to wait until all the green is dry so it doesn’t muck up the colors of wildflowers. You KNOW I will put in more wildflowers. 😎

Time to begin the last oil painting in the queue. It won’t be the last one for the solo show in the fall; it is the final one before I start painting smaller pieces of Mineral King to sell in the summer.

This is a special Tulare County view; it is from a place open by invitation only. We were fortunate/lucky/blessed* enough to receive such an invitation last spring.

It is important that I get the snow-covered Sierra Nevada accurate. Sorting out all the peaks is very time consuming, so I skipped it on this day in order to see some bigger progress.

I had to stop painting because it gets dark at the end of the day, in spite of the time change. (You can’t make a blanket longer by cutting off the bottom foot and sewing it to the top.)

There will be wildflowers. . . thank you for asking.

*Pick your favorite adjective.

Watching Deer or Oil Painting?

It’s kind of hard to focus on painting when this is outside the door.

Apparently, I’m not the only creature to appreciate spring in Three Rivers.

This little herd is just one body short of a baseball team. It looks as if this is a deer park, rather than my lawn. Actually, it isn’t even a lawn; we stopped watering it a decade or more ago. Water costs too much here. I love it green, but I’d have to work more and sell more instead of staring at the deer if I wanted to keep it like this through the summer.

Besides, lawn mowers will be outlawed in California in 2025. . . we don’t want to wear ours out if there can be no replacing it. (California is a special kind of stupid.)

We’ll look at the oil painting aspect of my life in the next post.

Painting Spring in Spring

We had a beautiful spring day before spring arrived. Instead of being out enjoying spring, I was inside painting a picture of spring.

First, I varnished four newly dried paintings.

It was definitely an open-door sort of day.

The view was distracting, but I needed to be focused on the scene on the easel.

This is what remains: details on the distant trees and shrubs; lower section of rock, grasses behind left-side lupine; MORE WILDFLOWERS!

Sigh. I’d like to be out on the trail instead of in the painting workshop. However, the foot trouble has a good side because it keeps me planted in front of the easels when I have many paintings to finish of Tulare County’s prettiest places.

Spring is here in our world of Three Rivers, and it is almost here on the calendar.

Compiling and Amalgamating

Sometimes I see a beautiful scene that just can’t be captured with a single photograph. The light is wrong so the colors come out weird, or there are branches obstructing important views. So, I take as many photos as possible and then put them together in a rough manner using Photoshop Junior. (Photoshop Elements is the “easy version”, in case you are wondering what Photoshop Junior is.)

One spring morning last year, my neighbor and I were walking on a trail above our houses in Three Rivers. I knew it had the makings of a nice painting, but I only had the inferior camera on my phone, and the light was quite low.

I took all these photos anyway. Each one had something going for it, and I hoped that I could patch them together to capture the moment in a believable manner.

Comb Rocks shows well.
strong color on distant hills
nice trail
Comb Rocks
visible flowers
different exposure, more flowers

After putzing around on Photoshop Junior, I decided that a square format looked best. Using Photoshop is the modern version of doing a “thumbnail sketch”, something art teachers always insisted on but never explained properly (like much of what was required in art classes, heavy sigh.) It is a way to see if all the elements look good together, are the right sizes and in the right places.

This is more of how I want it to look, but the trail is going the wrong direction.

I made the distant hills larger, emphasized the colors, made sure the hills included the landmark Comb Rocks, placed the trail where I wanted, and filled the foreground with wildflowers.

I finally got the photos to fit together in the best possible way. Here is the final painting, still untitled.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! I wonder why it took me so many years to learn to use my computer this way. Must be slow on the uptake. . . certainly not an early adopter of tech. . . plodding. . .the way I’ve always done it.

The Way I Remember It

There is a place near me here in Tulare County that is fantastical for spring-time hiking, particularly in a wet year. The views, green, trees, flowing water, and wildflowers are utter perfection, unless you try to get a good photo. Then, all the beautiful things that you remember end up in different pictures.

What’s an artist to do? Why, use Photoshop Junior, of course! (My attempt is a mess, so I am not going to show you. . . something about watching sausage being made comes to mind here. . .)

I started with the sky, of course, and then began on the most distant hills.

Because the photos are on my laptop, I can make specific areas as large as necessary to pick out the various textures and colors.

I moved across from left to right on those distant hills, and then I decided that the lupine were calling my name.

The final step at the end of the painting session used up various greens on the palette.

I love walking up there. Nope, I’m not giving the location. It really frosts me when people publicize nice quiet local places all over the interwebs and then there is traffic, a parking problem, and too many people. Tell your friends if you want, but WHY do you have to tell the WHOLE WORLD??

The painting isn’t any one exact location up there. This is the way I want to remember the place.

I might want to keep this painting. That has been happening lately; I’ll take it as a good sign.

Finessing and Polishing

My natural bent is toward finishing. It is satisfying to git-‘er-dun, to cross things off the lists, to move things into the finished column. Perfectionism is for other people.

However, as I prepare for the solo show in the fall of Tulare County’s prettiest places, I am warning and counseling myself to not settle for merely finished. A painting will be finished, drying in the house, and as I pass by it multiple times, suddenly a detail will be wrong or missing.

Example #1: Big Oak. The shadow beneath the tree (or maybe it was supposed to be dirt in shadow) looked red. I kept ignoring it, and then one day I saw that the trunk of the tree wasn’t dark enough. Back to the easel!

Before
After

The lighting is too different for the improvements to show here. I guess you’ll have to trust me.

Example #2: The Homer Barn. Yesterday after I showed it to you, I wrote this: “AND NOW I SEE SOMETHING ELSE TO FIX!!” What?? Yeppers. The cows were too small.

Before
Photoshopped version

After messing around on photoshop to see if it looked better, I returned to the easel. The paint wasn’t flowing well, so I reduced the size of the herd. I also didn’t get them as large as the photoshopped version, but decided to settle.

I wonder how long this version will be acceptable to me in my new mode of finessing and polishing? (Never a real perfectionist)

Painting on a Rainy Day

On March 1, a Big Storm, nay, a Very Big Blizzard was predicted. I painted that day, of course working on more pieces of Tulare County’s prettiest places.

I just couldn’t leave this one alone. A couple of things were nagging, so in spite of thinking it was finished, I made a few more tiny improvements. Can you see what they are?

AND NOW I SEE SOMETHING ELSE TO FIX!! Sigh. Will this painting ever meet my ever-increasing standards??

The trail painting needed another layer, some corrections, and the wildflowers.

Then, it finally rained. Trail Guy raced out to tell me to come look, hurry hurry hurry. So, I did.

Tucker had diamonds in his fur. The camera didn’t quite capture the magic.

So, I went back to the easel to work on White Chief (Mineral King). First, I redid the sky, then added some refinement to the peak. (You’ll have to wait until you see it in person to appreciate the amount of detail.)

After that, I worked on rocks and grass.

Finally, I worked on the water, bigger rocks, and placed some trunks of trees, doing my best to not arrange them like an orchard. There is an automatic bent to put things the same distance apart; I do it, my drawing students do it, and we all have to remind one another to keep things looking natural and a bit more haphazard. (Of course, if we are trying to make something perfect such as stairs, we cannot make it look right.)

This one is shaping up very nicely. I love White Chief (in Mineral King), and it feels as if I am there when I am painting it (minus the gasping and sweating and tired legs). The trees, more waterworks, and the rocky thingie on the bottom left remain. Then I’ll probably keep polishing and refining, because that’s what I do.

Six Oil Paintings at Five Stages

I have oil paintings at every stage right now. All depict Tulare County places, because that is where your Central California artist resides. She is a Tulare County artist, perhaps more accurately known as a “regionalist from Quaintsville”.

Finished, scanned, ready to show and sell:

Big Oak, 11×14″
Olive Grove, 10×10″

Finished, changed my mind, made it better, now drying again:

Before
After

Hard to compare fairly when the coloring is so different.

Barely begun:

Sold:

Sold, but I forgot to sign it, so I delivered it with a wet signature.

Newly painted to replace the sold poppies:

This one was photographed at the end of the day in low light as it was getting transported to the house for drying.

Spring is Short so Enjoy it Now!

Spring is exceedingly short, a beautiful season that could be cut off by a quick few days of heat. Last week in one of my regular posts of watching paint go slowly onto a canvas, I ended the post with a photo of my yard (“the yard”, “our yard”, the place outside of my home, oops, our home and my studio, etc.) and that photo received the comments. I think I can figure out what you, O Blog Reader, wants to see more than watching wet oil paint land on canvas.

Today we will have a spring fling thing.

These tiny blue flowers have the odd name of Speedwell, or Bird’s Eye Speedwell.
Baby-blue-eyes might be my favorite. You have to know where to look for them, and I do. Every year. They are earlier this year than usual.
These tiny bright spots should be called Magenta Maids, but the real name is Red Maids.
Looks like popcorn, but these are actually the bloom on Miner’s Lettuce.
Miner’s Lettuce and Fiddleneck are the earliest wildflowers in Three Rivers.

Last week Blog Reader Anne asked if I ever sit in the white chairs. Indeed I do, and Tucker often joins me.

But then Pippin butts in.

He’s kind of irresistible.

(Jackson isn’t very social nor is he loving or even friendly. He’s fine—Thanks for your concern.)

The flowers behind the white chairs have the unlovely name of “freeway daisies”. When the nursery owner showed them to me about 25 years ago, I said, “Those leaves are hideous so I bet they’ll do well in my yard.” The leaves without the flowers look sort of spiky, but the prolific flowers and easy propagation have overcome any objections on my part, although they do clash in color with the flowering quince. Since the deer don’t eat either of them and they bloom, I can handle a bit of color clashiness.

A few days ago, a dear friend tiptoed up to the front porch and left this incredible pot of tulips. They don’t grow well around here, so they are a HUGE floral treat.

They look electrified in the morning sun!

Just hanging around the tulips caused me to look for other things to photograph in the yard.

Yeppers, white daffodils.
This guy is early too. It is profuse in the pots by my studio all summer long.

Finally, I saw this freesia in my not-quite-awakened lawn (the one I let grow tall in the summer so Tucker and I can play hide-and-seek in the grass). How did it get there??

I love spring. LOVE IT!! Especially in Three Rivers.

A Good Painting Day

What makes a good painting day? So glad you asked. It is a day where I make visible progress on paintings, the kind of progress that makes me like the pieces I am working on, and the kind of progress that brings me closer to putting the paintings on the DONE list of Tulare County’s prettiest places.

I didn’t photograph this one after putting on the final touches, so I’ll just tell you that I fixed the branch in the center that is too light and too straight. I also added a few branches hanging down in front of the main tree with leaves and a hint of olives. Then, I signed it!

The road is dirt now. Yeah, yeah, I know that Dry Creek Road is paved, has a center line, and feels like a freeway compared to the Mineral King Road. But this is my painting. So, moo. I also tightened a few details on the barn.

This one needs to dry so that I can add wildflowers. Looks as if that leaning tree on the left could use a bit of straightening. It didn’t look weird in the photo, but it isn’t translating well here. When the flowers are in the painting, I will do a post showing you all the photos that I used to make this scene, which is the best representation of my memory of walking this trail on a very early morning last spring. The photos just don’t tell the story.

This painting is another compilation, or perhaps amalgamation is a better word, of many photos. I know how it looks in person, the camera doesn’t tell the story, and so I mess with the photos on Photoshop to see if I can make the different elements work together. Then I use that to create the scene I remember.

This was so fun. It felt as if I was painting for an hour or so, and suddenly, the day was over!