Pond At Macks Apples Plein Air

pastel 11x14
Plein Aire
Painted with the Plein Aire Society Of New Hampshire today. They were actually in Londonderry where I live and had several different spots around town. This one is across from Macks Apple stand, a small pond with apple trees in the background. I painted this with a different approach than I usually do, its a broken color tech., where you keep applying color crossing each other to allow it to mix visually with your eyes. I am finding it hard to get my colors as bright as I would in the studio, another lesson to be learned.

Rickers Pond VT plein aire

11X14"
This weekend we went camping during Labor day Vacation in Vermont. Beautiful little state campground on Rickers Pond. It had nice sandy beach edges, except for the ground nesting bees's it would have been perfect. The rangers came and sprayed the nest and the next day we were in business to swim and get on our canoe and kayak. This is looking down into the next camping site which had a pop up camper behind the clump of trees to the right, which I left out naturally. The birch trees were all leaning in towards the water, very pretty. I took a photo with my camera to compare what I painted. What a difference, between the two. If I had painted this from the photo I think it would be completely different and lost alot of the distance feeling to it. I wouldn't have even seen the Birches in the back.

Sunflowers Abstract Plein Aire

Another Plein Aire from last week. 11x14" on matboard with colorfix primer.
The sunflowers are in a fenched in areia in our backyard, behind them is our chicken coop to which i orginally had in this but it had too many line horizontally so i mushed it out. Needed something to let the flowers come forward so i just blocked them in....so an abstract quality to it. 1 hour.

Back Yard Plein Aire

My last attempt was while sitting on my pool deck. I was so slow that the sun had changed position sooner than i had hoped. My kitty wandered in while i was fiddling at the left tree and I managed to get him sketched in enough to look like a cat. My first moving object. :) Oh these are 11x14's.

Shaker Village in New Hampsire

My 3rd attempt at Plein aire. This was at the Shaker Village in NH. I painted along side a guy from the NH Plein Aire society that I joined this summer. This was my outing and only Dan showed up...so it was a gentle introduction into painting outside with others. He painted on very small pieces of black canson and made very nice little pastel paintings that reminded my of wood block printings. I was happy with this but I think the bushes in the back could have been toned down more.

The Lake plein aire

This is my 2nd attempt at painting plein aire....(in real life). It was a really hot hot day and I was sitting in the back of my pickup truck looking across the lake. Water dripping down my back...YUK! A nice gentleman sat next to me and was very nice....people watching me paint, make me very nervous....plein aire even more so as I'm figuring it out. Wow its pretty hard to cut out soo much information when your painting right out in it. I did manage to get the far side of the lake move back into space so that was a beginning. Had to leave before i could really get going.

stella dora daylillies plein aire

I'm back! I have been busy this summer with camping and the kids. I got a plein aire setup a versa easy-L. I have been worried about starting out with plein aire...so my first step was this little 5x7 from my garden. My kids saw me all set up in the sun and had to laugh as i had a beach umbrella and a floppy sunhat on...trying to look all artisty in front of my new setup. :)