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.
