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.

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.

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)

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.

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!

Four New Starts, One Signature, and My Yard

Let’s start with the signature. This indicates that I am finished with a painting, although I can be convinced to return to it later if something needs fixing up, something that I didn’t notice earlier.

Now, to the new paintings. As normal, I studied my photos, messed with a few on Photoshop Jr. in order to blend several images of the same scene into a more perfect version (if one ignores all the sloppy photoshop seams), looked at the available canvases and chose sizes.

The first one is a 10×10 scene of a trail, not a road. I’m tired of struggling with roads. At the time of these four new starts, I have 2 paintings with unsatisfactory roads holding up the completion. Roadwork is often an obstacle to progress, don’t you think?

This might be easy for a few folks to recognize, although I’ve never painted this view before. Getting the shapes right was tricky, because I blended several photos together, so after messing with the shapes for awhile, I realized that the sky would be an easy step forward.

I’ve never painted this scene before either, and yet I am boldly marching forth on a 16×20 canvas, which is quite huge for me. It will have a stormy sky, in case you are wondering why it is grayish.

Finally, here is one that is probably going to be the most difficult. The size is 10×20″, and once again, it is a scene I haven’t attempted before. I drew the general shapes first. It felt too hard, with many of the shapes fuzzy in the distance, morphing into the next shapes, looking enough alike to confound me each time I looked at the photo.

Baby steps. Just get some color down, Central California Artist—it ain’t rocket surgery!

Sky. I can paint sky without too many worries.

Some days painting feels very difficult. If my feet didn’t already hurt, I might be tempted to go find a job as a waitress, a cafeteria worker, or maybe as a checker in a grocery store. HOWEVER, I feel a calling, a responsibility, almost a sense of urgency to paint the prettiest places in Tulare County before I am too old or they are all gone.

LOOK AT MY YARD RIGHT NOW!! (Those are flowering quince.)

Farming With Paint?

This day’s oil painting session went from an olive grove to a walnut grove. (Grove or orchard? Same thing.) The day ended with a potential cattle ranch.

The last olive grove painting session left me with this mess to tackle, layer by layer.

I began with improving the trunks and branches. Here you can see one of the main reference photos.

Next I put in leafy texture.

The front gnarly trunk needed detailing, and now it needs to dry. After it dries, I will fix anything that is looking wrong, and then, if the paint is flowing well, if the force is with my brushes, and if I become one with the canvas, I hope to put in some close branches where you can see leaves and olives.

Time to visit a walnut grove. Clearly, this is a walnut grove, no?

No. It is not clearly a walnut grove. All the lined up trees seemed difficult (read “impossible”). I started with the closer trees.

Here you can see the main reference photo. It was a little tricky to condense a rectangle into a square and do it believably. I don’t feel the need to put in every tree. I do feel the need to have the trees line up in their rows. (How do farmers plant their orchards so perfectly?)

I got tired of brown, so I moved to the distant horizon line and put in the sunlit green in the distance, and then patches of sunlight on the ground. It isn’t as close to finished as the olive grove painting, but I ran out of daylight and the cats wanted to reclaim the workshop as their cafeteria and dorm.

But first, I erased the center line on the road of this painting. There was a bit of a pickle here: I want cows, but that means a fence, and without a real photo of a fence in this position, it is too risky in terms of believability. I could do it if it meant saving all the women and children, but this doesn’t come anywhere near that sense of desperation. So, I messed up the center line and the asphalt, and when it dries, I will try to make it look like dirt or gravel, which means the cows won’t need a fence.

It was really getting dark out. I was cold, tired of difficult decisions, and the cats wanted dinner, so that was the end of my day of farming with a paintbrush in the groves, orchards and ranches of Tulare County.

Little Things Mean a Lot

It often just comes down to the little things, the details, those finishing touches on a painting that bring the most satisfaction. Here are five paintings that I added little things to on a single morning of painting.

Tucker wanted to know if I was going to be there for awhile.

Big Oak: I studied this painting for awhile and decided the dirt patch at the bottom might be too large— “might be” was enough to make me go back to touch it up.

I signed it too. Wow. Was that worth the effort? Maybe.

Square Orange Grove: I thought this was finished but maybe I wasn’t convinced, because I didn’t sign it. Trail Guy asked me why I hadn’t put orange blossoms on the close trees. Ummm, I forgot. . .

Excellent! And now it is signed too. All it needs is a title (I’ve been calling it The 16×16″), photography, and varnish.

Take Me Home: I tried to put a single leaf in tight detail on the road. It looked dumb. So, I put in texture to resemble dirt, rocks, sticks, and basic dirt road debris. Then I signed it. I don’t want to work on this painting anymore. (But I will if someone tells me something that would make a measurable difference.)

Homer Barn: I had forgotten to put the trees on top of the left hills, and the road wasn’t quite right. I worked on the shoulder of the road and added a layer to the field on the right.

Now I have to decide if it should have cows on the right, which will mean it needs a fence. I’ll just wait on these decisions until the road and other new parts are dry.

Dry Creek Wildflowers: more lupine and leaves on the skeletal tree were needed.

This could be signed now, but then again, I might keep “polishing”. I might want to keep this one. . . maybe I’ll just keep working on it so it isn’t ever quite ready to sell.

Yeppers, Tuck, I was here long enough to bore you to sleep.

And thus we conclude another tour through painting the prettiest places in Tulare County.

A Three-Painting Day

Three paintings of Tulare County scenery were brought closer to completion on a productive day of painting. Two were fun, and one is still riding the struggle bus.

Not a lot to say about this other than I photographed each step.

It was fun to detail the unusual barn, and now I need to detail the road and lower right pasture.

This painting is really fun. I filled in green around the rest of the poppies, added more green in the lower regions, built the oak tree (needs the beginnings of spring leaves), and put the lupine stalks in place.

I took this painting to a life-long friend for her input. She has a great eye for design and has assisted me in the past. She suggested more of an overarching canopy and more detail on the road (which was also suggested by my friend and blog reader MB). I got this far on the canopy before the light ran out.

Maybe adding tire tracks, more light, and some dirt clods will be all this piece requires before it exits the struggle bus.