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.