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.

Burning Off

Burning Off, 6 x 8
$85
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Typical to Austin for about nine months of the year, low level, early morning clouds are hurried overhead by southerly winds from the gulf. This time of year, the sun wastes little time evaporating the morning dew into such clouds, as it did today at Laguna Gloria, our paint-out rendezvous point this time around.