First Class Palms

 

Plein Air Class Study, 8 x 6

I titled this post First Class Palms because, you guessed it, today was the first session in our most recent plein air class. This is a pretty quick study, in terms of total time spent painting, as we spent a good bit of class watching and learning from Laurel as she demonstrated a line and mass block-in. When it was our turn, we were to simplify the main value masses into verticals (darkest darks found here); inclined planes (sloping planes such as mountains, hills or rooftops, which are the next lightest of the four; then the ground plane, which catches more light than anything except the surface of water at a distance and finally, the sky. This is a pretty down and dirty field study, in which I focused on these main values rather than on getting accurate color, and which is fairly obvious in this image.