December 2014

 

I finished up the fall session of my painting class with one more painting, a beach scene. It was based on a photo that was dominated by the mass of dune grass on the right, and the fence across the bottom. I didn't like the composition much, and I changed it a bit, but I could have changed it more. After I had done most of the grass, Ron commented that it was a bit too uniform. I tried to vary it, but with the dark shadows already in place, I couldn't do very much. But I like how the colors came out, and overall I think it is pretty good.

One afternoon a week or so ago, Maureen and Cherry were going to ride our horses, and I went along to help with the work, but mostly just to sit and watch them ride. It was nearly sunset and the view of the bay beyond the arena was really beautiful with warm colors and low-angle lighting. I thought that it might be fun to try to paint, so I took a few photos with my iPhone. I knew that the colors would probably not show up correctly, but at least I would have the outlines of the scene to follow. I chose one of Cherry on Rio to paint. When the sun hits Rio a certain way, his reddish coat really glows. That's what I wanted to show in my painting. I always seem to have trouble with large areas of dark painting like the foreground here, which I wanted to be smoother and darker and not so muddy. If I had started out with my first wash much darker and not so wet, it would have turned out much better.

November 2014

The teacher of my watercolor class, Ron Pratt, had recently spent a few days in Colorado to film a demonstration video. He came back with a photo from a calendar that he found there, and made it the subject of our painting project. It was a very colorful fall color scene in the mountains. Here in California, where fall color scenes are not so easy to find, it is hard to believe the colors of other parts of the country. I always like painting mountains, so I made them a bit more prominent than the photo. I also followed Ron's lead in adding the river, which was was hidden by brush. Otherwise, it is pretty close to the photo. It was fun to paint with such bright colors, and I think it turned out pretty good.

After spending a couple of classes on the mountain scene, we spent a couple more weeks on a scene in the woods. I don't know where this photo came from, but to me it looks like somewhere in the eastern part of the country. The photo showed lots of fall color, but it was kind of washed-out looking, so I made up a lot of the scene to try to give it more life. Like the mountain scene, it was fun to use a lot of bright colors, which were added in a somewhat haphazard manner at the start. I usually like to follow a photo pretty closely, but with these last couple of paintings, I'm finding that I am becoming a bit more confident in using my imagination.

October 2014

I missed the second week of my painting class because we finally did our trip to the mountains that we had planned for a month or so earlier. We kept putting off the trip because our horse, Rio, got some kind of spider bite and his left front leg swelled up to more than twice its normal size, and he could barely walk. After nearly two months of vet visits and treatments, he is almost ready to ride again. We had planned to go camping, but decided to make it easy on ourselves and we stayed three nights in a cabin near Mammoth Lakes. It was kind of a short trip, but we had a great time.

When I returned to my class, the assignment was to work on a painting for a holiday card. We could choose any subject that we wanted. Maureen suggested that I use one of our photos from a trip to the snow with the kids a couple of years ago. I found one with lots of people having fun in the snow, and found it fairly easy to paint. People in my class saw what I was doing and commented on how hard it looked. But really, much of the area is just white paper with a few blue shadows and the people are too small to do much detail.

The following week, my class was still working on the holiday card, but I had finished my snow scene, so I brought several photos from our recent trip. I chose to try one of a rocky mountainside with some colorful aspens. This was in Little Lakes Valley, a short hike from the Mosquito Flat Trailhead at the end of the Rock Creek Road. This is just about the best place in the Sierra to see timberline country without much hiking, because the trailhead is over 10,000 ft. elevation. Late in September, the aspens were turning yellow and red here, but still green at lower elevations. I took the liberty of adding a little stream in the meadow, but in this drought year, it was all dry.

After finishing the painting with the aspens, I had another photo that I wanted to try to paint. This was also in Little Lakes Valley, a lake with lots of sparkly sun reflections. I thought it would be a fun challenge to see what I could do with the sparkles. I started out using a dry brush technique on the water, which gave me some of the effect that I wanted, but it was really messy and I almost gave up and trashed the painting. But then I decided that I may as well keep trying to make something of it. A bit of touch up with opaque white helped a lot, although I still see it as pretty messy. But overall, I like it pretty well. I think if I were to do it again, I would try using masking fluid for the sparkles. Maybe I'll do that one of these days.

September 2014

A week or so ago, I went hiking in Sunol Regional Park. I saw lots of nice scenery but not too much that inspired me to paint it. But as I was walking along, something drew my eye to this grouping of oaks on a dry hillside. Years ago, I would have just let it go by, thinking that it wasn't worth wasting film on, but now when something catches my eye, I can just pull our my iphone and snap a photo. I thought it would be just another throw-away shot, but when I looked at my photos later, this one was the only one of many that I thought I would like to paint. Something about the arrangement of the trees and the shadows spreading down from the center said something to me. Something that couldn't be put in words. The red poison oak on the left adds something too. It is pretty loose and quickly done, but I like it a lot.

My painting class started up again a couple of days ago, and I needed something to work on in class. I remembered that I had a shot of a little cottontail bunny that I shot on our trip this summer. I also had another photo of the distant view from the same spot as the bunny, and I thought I could combine the two. This was on highway 40 at the Utah-Colorado border just south of Dinosaur National Monument. I hoped it would show the difference in scale between the bunny's world of rocks and grass, and the wide open spaces of plains and mountains. Instead, is seems to bring them together, which maybe is what I had in mind anyway. Maureen thinks the bunny looks too big. That's probably the result of combining a close-up shot with a distant view. I suppose I could have done better with the perspective. It's another quickly done painting, but I like it.

August 2014

I've been trying to keep going with my painting to keep from losing some of what little skill I have. It seems that the more often I paint, the more sure my brush strokes and the better my paintings. If I neglect it for very long, when I start again, I feel a lot less sure of what I am doing. In that way it is kind of like playing the guitar or any musical instrument. Regular practice makes it better.

A few weeks ago, Maureen and I spent a Sunday with our son, Aaron, his wife, Alicia, and our three-year-old grandson, Dylan. We took the ferry from Alameda to San Francisco and wandered around Fisherman's Wharf. We had a great time, and on the way back home, the ferry made a stop at Angel Island. On the way back, we had a nice view of the Golden Gate with the fog bank just beyond it, and a sailboat floating by. I thought it would make a good scene for a painting, so I shot it with my iPhone. I included the heads of a couple of passengers to show that the wind was a major part of the scene.

I decided to try another scene from our visit with my cousin John and his wife Pat in Colorado. This is the view from the front of their house. Actually, it is put together from several photos, but it is not too far from reality. They have such a beautiful place that wherever you look you see something like this.

July 2014

This summer I haven't been as productive with my painting as I could have been. I guess I need my weekly class to keep me going. Maureen and I went on a great trip to Utah and Colorado in early July, and I brought home lots of photos that I hoped to turn into paintings. But for some reason, I've been reluctant to get started. It may be that some of the places we saw were just so beautiful that I'm afraid that my art will fall far short of showing them as they are. I know that I should just keep telling myself that it doesn't matter, that painting anything is better than not painting at all.

 I have managed to do a couple of paintings, however. For this first one, I thought that maybe if I tried something that was not from our trip, I could get myself started. In my last blog post, I showed one of a group of riders crossing a creek. There was another photo from that same ride in Big Basin State Park that I had wanted to paint, so that's what I chose to do. This is West Waddell Creek, just below Berry Creek Falls. I wanted to see what I could do with the lush greenness and the reflections in the water, and I think I did pretty well.

This morning, I finally tried one from our trip. We stayed several days with my cousin, John, and his wife, Pat, at their place in the mountains near Boulder. Late one afternoon, I spent some time just wandering around taking pictures that I thought might become paintings. This one was of their driveway with a puddle from a recent rainstorm. Yes, they actually have rain in the summertime there, something that made us Californians quite envious. I don't usually do so much with clouds, but I thought it was worth a try. The painting was fairly quickly done, and is rather sketchy, but I think I caught some of the beauty of the place.

June 2014

A few months ago, I painted a creek scene from a photo taken on our sierra camping trip last summer. The painting was not too bad, but I wasn't very satisfied with it and thought I could it better. I don't usually like to re-do a painting. It feels like too much work. A lot of artists do repeat the same idea, trying to get the most out of it. Georgia O'Keefe comes to mind and her series of Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers. In that case, her paintings became increasingly abstract as she zoomed in on the essence of the idea. But that kind of thing is way beyond my reach.

I didn't get off to a very good start with this one. I was in too much of a hurry, and I put down masking fluid over some already painted areas before they were completely dry. When I pulled off the mask, a lot of the color came with it, leaving splotchy areas. I was able to patch them up pretty well and I think it ended up pretty good. I did the whole thing pretty fast, and maybe it would have been better to spend more time on it, but I like the looseness of it too.

A couple of months ago I went hiking in Bishop Ranch Regional Open Space in the hills west of San Ramon. I took a bunch of photos, but I thought one of an oak tree trunk and log would work best for a painting. I liked the sun and shadow on the foreground grass combined with a distant view. Like the previous painting, I feel like I rushed this one a bit, but I like it pretty well.

I was thinking that I'd like to do something with some water in a creek, and looking through some older photos, I came across one of a group of us crossing a creek on horseback. This was from a 2011 weekend horse camping trip to Rancho del Oso Horse Camp, part of Big Basin State Park. The photo wasn't a very good one, just a quick shot behind my back as my horse, Rio, was still climbing the bank, but I figured that a blurry photo wouldn't matter too much for a watercolor painting. The scene brings back some bittersweet memories, because Eddy, the second horse in line in the painting, is gone now. He passed away in his early thirties, so he had a full life.

May 2014

My watercolor class finished its spring session last week, so I'm on my own again until next fall (assuming that I'll take the class again, which I probably will). Although I missed a class when we spent a few days in Big Sur, I still managed to do a couple more class projects.

 

 This was another exercise in masking. We used a sponge to apply masking fluid to create blossoms in a tree. I wish I had stamped out more blossoms, but my masking fluid is nearly white so it is hard to see what I am doing. Ron's demonstration used all warm colors -- lots of pinks and oranges. As he was doing it, I commented that fall colors didn't quite go with blossoms on the trees. I was just joking but he seemed to take it more seriously and the following week he brought in a photo of a springtime sunset scene with all warm colors just to show that it was possible. As you can see, I stuck with colors that I thought fit the season. Several people commented that they liked what I had done, but to me it is just OK. I didn't put too much effort into it anyway.

This is our last class project, a cafe scene in New Orleans from one of Ron's photos. I got more involved in this than the previous project. I liked the building and the people presented a bit of challenge. I think it came out pretty good. I like the challenge of trying to keep it kind of loose but putting in enough detail that it has a bit of realism.

 

One day I did a fairly challenging hike to the Knobcone Point area of Mount Diablo. It was a beautiful hike and when I got home I wanted to paint something that showed the varied terrain of the area -- rocky chaparral, oak woodland and grassland. I used a photo from my iPhone, with a little fudging with the composition. It's not exactly what I had hoped for, but overall, I think it is pretty good. I especially like the cloud shadows on the peak of Mt. Diablo in the background.

One day after watching my grandson, Zachary, play baseball, we stopped by at the San Leandro Cherry Festival. We've lived in the area for a very long time, but we had never been to this festival, which celebrates the cherry orchards that once covered the area but which have been long paved over. I took a picture with my iPhone to get the contrast between the colorful crowds and the rather austere looking Saint Leander's church behind them. Once again, the people were a challenge, but as you can see, I didn't try too hard for a lot of small detail. It came out OK, and it was fun to do.

Recently, I found something that may influence the direction of my painting. I went to the new Kaiser San Leandro Medical Center for an echocardiogram, and there in the cardiology waiting room, were a couple of very beautiful watercolors. I always like seeing other painters work, and I am usually quite impressed by it, but these were really exceptional. The painter is Dan Petersen, who lives in the central valley and is retired after teaching for many years at Modesto Junior College. His landscapes have a lot of sharp detail, with a lot of beautiful flowing lines and vibrant colors. I looked him up online (petersenwatercolor.com), and found that he had made a DVD demonstrating his techniques. I ordered a copy, and found a lot of useful ideas on it. I'm going to try to incorporate some of what I learned in my future painting, but probably won't try to copy all of his methods. He uses a lot of masking, adding washes over and over again, and spends way more time on each painting than most watercolorists do. I probably don't have that much patience, but it will be good to know that the possibility is there if I ever feel like working that hard on a painting.

More Spring 2014

The second project for my watercolor class was a flower garden. The idea was to start by using masking fluid to mask a few flowers to be white ones, then add a few blobs of color for more flowers and mask flower shapes over them, do the same again with some other colors until we had lots of colorful flowers, all masked. Then the background, which was mostly green, was added, and finally the masking removed to reveal an almost finished painting. It was fun to do, and I think mine came out pretty good, but since I'm not much into gardening, the flowers are all imaginary, and there is not much connection with reality like I usually try for in my painting.

In between class projects, I did a couple of other paintings of High Sierra scenes which have a lot more connection with reality. Both of these are from photos taken on a 2008 backpacking trip with my friend, Gerald.

This one is of Pioneer Basin, which was our ultimate goal of the trip. We spent the morning of our third day of the trip in the basin, Gerald doing some fishing and me wandering around taking photos. It is a very beautiful area, a string of small lakes near timberline at 11,000 ft. I had fond memories from when my dad and I visited it nearly 50 years ago. I like this painting a lot. I can see in it the powerful high country light, the cool, thin air, the silence.

This one is a little meadow just below Ruby Lake, which we passed on our first day of hiking. Clouds were starting to build up over the incredible 13,000 ft. ridge behind the lake. I really like the way this one came out too.

Recently, Maureen and I went to see the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit at the De Young Museum. It was of her Lake George years, and included her giant close-ups of flowers, and some abstract work. Afterwards, I kept thinking that I wish I could paint stuff like that, and maybe I should try to put more abstraction into my painting. As you can see from the above paintings, it didn't happen. I seem to be stuck on realism, at least for now. But I'm going to keep trying to let new ways of seeing get into my artwork.

Spring 2014

We've been quite busy the last few weeks, but I still got around to doing several paintings. I did this one for our friends Christina and Mike, and it is the two of their horses that they brought on our yearly horse camping trip last September. On the left is Aurora, a beautiful blue roan mare. Roan horses have a mixture of light and dark hair that makes their coat kind of shimmer. It's not easy to capture that effect in a painting or a photo, but it was worth a try. On the right is Wiz, Aurora's son, a buckskin gelding. They are both really nice horses, and we enjoyed being with them. I find painting animals to be a lot more challenging than most other kinds of subjects, but it wouldn't be as much fun if it was easy.

The first assignment of the spring session of my watercolor class was to paint some Plumeria, a Hawaiian flower. This was an exercise in using masking fluid. It was based on one of Ron Pratt's photos. After masking the flowers, the green background was done as a wet-on-wet wash. Our teacher, Ron, left his background as a blur of greens, but I couldn't resist adding some darker greens to make some stems and leaves. I'm not familiar with this flower, so I can't tell whether my painting looks anything like the real thing, but I like it anyway.

It seems that I'm not done with my urge to paint scenes of the high sierra. And I'm not done with trying to capture reflections in lakes. This is from a photo that I took in August, 2008 on a backpacking trip with my friend, Gerald. It is early morning at Ruby Lake, at about 11,000 ft. in the Rock Creek area between Mammoth and Bishop. Once again, I ended up with a lot of muddy colors in the reflection, but I feel like I did better than previous attempts at this kind of scene. I have several other nice photos from this trip that would be fun to paint. In fact, I've already started on one of them, and you may see it here soon.

I know that some artists and photographers don't like to specify the exact locations of their landscapes because they want people to focus on their art, not the place it represents. They also don't want their special places overrun by people trying to copy what they have done. I don't feel that way. As one who has had a lifetime obsession with maps, specific places are very important to me and I want to share them with others. I feel that so many people today have very little contact with the natural world, and if I can encourage someone to get outdoors and maybe get a bit sweaty and dirty, I've done a good thing.

Two Barns

The spring session of my watercolor class started a week ago. It was fun to see all of the continuing students again plus a couple of new people. As usual, the first couple of classes cover materials and basic techniques, mostly for the new students, so I was free to work on whatever I wanted to. Anticipating this, I looked through a lot of our photos for ideas. I've always liked pictures of old barns, so I found several shots of barns that might work. I suppose that old barns could be seen as kind of an artistic cliché, but that doesn't bother me. I'm just painting for the fun of it and I don't care whether anyone takes it seriously.

This one was based on a shot I took last fall when I was on my way to Black Diamond Mines Regional Park for a hike. It's on Sommersville Road just before the park entrance. I think it turned out pretty good. It's really more about the feeling of being in the dry hills than about the barn.

This one is at Garland Ranch Regional Park in Carmel Valley, when we were there last fall. We like to spend a few days at a friend's cabin near Big Sur, and we often go to Garland Ranch because it is one of the few places in that area where we can walk with our dog. Most of the other places to walk are state parks which don't allow dogs on trails. I think this painting turned out pretty good too (meaning that it came out like I intended, which is often not the case with my watercolors).

Big McGee Lake

The winter session of my painting class ended a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to keep going with my painting. I thought maybe it was a good time to try some high mountain scenery. I looked through some recent photos but didn't see much to inspire me. I wanted some real alpine scenes and I found some from my last backpacking trip in August, 2010, when my friend Gerald and I did a 4-day trip to Big McGee Lake. At 10,500 ft. elevation, surrounded by 12,000 - 13,000 ft peaks, there was no shortage of beautiful scenery, and I took lots of photos. I was hoping to be able to paint something that would capture some of my love of this timberline country.

One morning, I spent an hour or so wandering around the meadows above our camp. I found this little stream cascading down to the lake and fisherman below. I like the painting, but in the upper area of water the vertical streaks don't look so good. They were in the photo so I tried to copy them. I believe that they were reflections of trees on the far side of the lake. I seem to have trouble painting lakes with large areas of dark washes, but I thought if I keep trying, maybe I'll get better at it.

I've always loved these alpine meadows with little streams sunk into the turf. This one was not far above the lake. I like the way it turned out.

The last sun of the day lights up Mt. Crocker across the lake. I made quite a mess of the lake, and went over it too many times trying to fix it. But there is still a lot that I like about the painting. Maybe I'll try again some day.

Here is an early afternoon view of the lake and Mt. Crocker as Gerald and I were leaving to hike back out. I wanted my photo to catch the sparkles in the lake, and that provided a challenge for the painting. This time I finally got a lake looking pretty good with just a single wet-on-wet wash, and I like the result.

I wasn't planning to do more than one or two paintings from this group of photos, but somehow I kept finding more scenes that I wanted to paint. This view is from our campsite in the early morning when the lake was very still. Besides the reflections in the water, I wanted to show some of the foreground with the rocks and scrawny lodgepole pines.

Hayward Scenes

Years ago, I did a painting of a view of Mission Blvd. in Hayward that I liked. That gave me the idea of doing a series of paintings of downtown Hayward. To anyone familiar with the city, this would probably seem like a pretty strange idea. Hayward is a very ordinary working-class town with few interesting landmarks and lots of ugly streets and buildings. But I've lived in it for 38 years and I've become rather attached to it. I like that it is so unpretentious and so typical of lots of American towns.

Here is Mission Blvd. near the Hayward Plunge, painted in 2000. The Giant Burger recently changed ownership and it has been fixed up, but it still looks much the same.

This is the Hayward City Hall on a Cinco de Mayo around 14 years ago. Just to the right of this scene there was a stage set up and young girls and boys in colorful costumes doing traditional dances. Actually Hayward has three city halls. One was built probably in the 30's on Mission Blvd. and lies directly on the Hayward fault. It is still standing, but unused. Another was built in the 60's on Foothill Blvd., a 10-story building that has been sitting empty for years after it was discovered that it was also near the fault and not earthquake safe. The current City Hall, built in the late 90's, is also near the fault, but hopefully was built to be strong enough to survive a quake.

This is the first of my more recent paintings. The Bistro, on the corner of B Street and Main, is just about the only place in town for any kind of night life with live music. It is part of the Green Shutter Hotel building. This is in the older part of downtown that has more of an urban character than the rest of Hayward.

All Saints church, at the corner of Second and D Streets, is a beautiful 100-year-old building that stands out on a hill above the downtown area. I see it as a symbol of the large Catholic presence in the city, with the history of Portuguese settlement and its big Mexican-American population.

The corner of Foothill and A Streets marks the center of downtown Hayward, as is clearly indicated by the new sign structures that now arch over Foothill. For as long as I've lived in Hayward, the city has been trying to revitalize the downtown area, which kind of went downhill years ago when shopping malls across town began to be more attractive to shoppers. Revitalization has had limited success, although there are recent signs of improvement. There is still not a lot going on downtown that would make anyone want to hang out there. I enjoyed the challenge of lots of detail in these paintings, and plan to do more one of these days.

Winter, 2014

Whenever a new session of my watercolor class begins, Ron spends the first couple of classes going over materials and basic techniques for the new students. The majority of the class are continuing students like myself, and we spend those first classes working on whatever we want.

Maureen and I had recently been to the DeYoung Museum to see the David Hockney exhibit, and on the way back to our car we walked past Stow Lake. I thought the scene would be good for a painting, so I took a few shots with my iPhone. At the first class of the winter session, I made an attempt at painting it. It wasn't too bad, but I wasn't satisfied with it and I had an hour or so of class left, so I started it again and finished later at home. I was having a hard time getting the lake to look like I wanted, and I almost messed up the second attempt too, but I was able to lift off some of the paint and start again, and it finally came out pretty good.

Whenever I'm out hiking, I love finding interesting rocks. For one Wednesday class, I really felt like painting some rocks, so I looked through my photos and found one from a hike on Pleasanton Ridge. I feel like this is one painting where I got lucky. The washes all came out pretty much how I wanted and it is now one of my favorites.

While my mind was still on rocks, I decided to try another one. This was from a photo taken on Dinosaur Ridge, a hilltop just north of Castro Valley in the EBMUD watershed. These rocks are sandstone with lots of fossil seashells embedded. I thought the shells were too small to paint, but I still liked the look of the rocks. I was not so lucky with this one, and at times thought it was too messed up to finish, but I somehow managed to fix it enough that I'm OK with it.

I missed a couple of classes because I was in the hospital having bypass surgery, and when I came back, I worked on this class project — a Mexican house from one of Ron's photos. It was not an easy picture to work from, with flat lighting and lots of detail. But I'm fairly pleased with how mine turned out. One thing I learned is that I shouldn't have tried to paint every rock in the stone wall.

This was another class project. Once again it is based on one of Ron's photos. In the photo, the stream was nearly invisible because it was mostly in shadow. I did a lot of thinking about how to make it show up, but it luckily came out a lot lighter than the banks which worked out well.

Spring - Summer 2013

I'm going to try to bring this blog up to date, but first I want to add some older paintings from last spring and summer, when my interest in painting was revived after many years of dormancy.

This hummingbird was my first painting that I did in Ron Pratt's class. It was an exercise in using masking fluid.

I believe this was the second in-class painting. It was from a picture of a Hawaiian waterfall on a magazine cover.

This Mexican seacoast view was from one of Ron's photos. I believe it is Puerto Vallarta.

Another in-class painting. This is from a photo of a vineyard near Murphys.

 When the spring session of the class was over, I wanted to keep up the momentum that I had going, so I began working from my own photos. This one is from Anza Borrego, which we visited on a trip earlier in the year.

We enjoyed watching a couple of horse races at the Alameda County fair, and I tried to take some photos to catch the action. My photos weren't much good, so I went online and found a much better one to paint from. I was hoping to show some of the power and speed of the race.

At the Oakland Museum, we enjoyed watching the koi in a lily pond just outside the entrance. I wanted to recreate the scene in a painting. I wasn't completely satisfied with the result, so I tried it again using masking fluid for the fish. It came out better in some ways, but the fish with hard edges didn't appear to be under the water, so I like this one better.

This one is a typical view from one of our trail rides in Garin Park. Maureen is riding our horse, Zach, and our friend Sara is on Vedra in the lead. I was riding Rio, who is often content with following the others, so our view is usually of the rear ends of the other horses.

This is the cabin near Big Sur that we go to usually at least once a year. It is a beautiful, quiet spot in the redwoods a couple of miles up a canyon from the coast.

This is our horse, Rio, the one that I usually ride.

On a hike at Mt. Diablo, I came across these rocks that I thought were worth a photo. I wanted to paint the scene, but felt that it could use something extra to make it seem more wild. I found a picture of a coyote online and he seemed to fit right in.

On another hike on Pleasanton Ridge, I came across these cows all lined up as if for inspection.

On the beach at Pescadero, we came across this flock of gulls. I managed to separate the gulls from the background with masking fluid.

We spent a week camping in the Sierra in August, and we went out to Hot Creek near Mammoth Lakes. This is the view from the road near the creek.

We camped at Twin Lakes near Bridgeport, and this was the creek near our campsite. I wanted to capture the colors of the creek as it went from shade to sunlight, but didn't quite get it. I still like the painting, although it is hard to tell that most of the orange area to the right is also water.

This is the meadow near our campsite in late afternoon. I combined parts of a couple of photos to get this composition.

Friends of ours have a ranch in the hills near Livermore, and on it they have two donkeys, Guido and Dolly. I framed this painting and gave it to them and they were very pleased with it. They now have it hanging in the ranch house.