We recently spent 8 days camping with our horses at Jack Brook Horse Camp near La Honda. We have been going there every year for something like 8 years with two other couples and their horses. We skipped last year because they scared us off with warnings about water restrictions, but we found out later that the restrictions were not so bad. This time I didn't bring any painting stuff because I figured that I would rather just relax when I wasn't riding or doing camp chores. I could paint from photos when I got back home. One day we drove to Half Moon Bay to buy a bale of hay and then stopped in Pescadero on the way back. I noticed this nice little house set back from the street and took a picture of it with my phone. A few days later when we were back home and I was looking at my photos for something to paint, I thought that it would be a good one to try. I think it turned out pretty good.
Actually, the first photo that I chose to paint from the camping trip was one of the redwood forest just a short walk from our campsite. I sketched it out and then was reluctant to start painting because I had a lot of doubts about being able to paint what I wanted it to look like. So I painted the little house first and after that I felt ready to try this one. I am quite pleased with the results. I find redwood forests incredibly beautiful, but capturing that beauty in a photo or a painting is not so easy. There is usually a great deal of contrast between the very dark shadows and the sunlit highlights, and the scene is filled with thousands of messy details. I've found that to paint it you need to do a lot of simplifying. For some reason, after doing most of my paintings in landscape format for the past few years, I chose to do two in a row in portrait format. I'm not sure why except that both of these scenes needed to be done that way.
