I find that when I paint my own ideas rather than those of my painting class, I often get better results. That's what happened this time anyway. I really like the class and all of the people in it, and Ron is a very good teacher, but sometimes I just need to do it my way. Maureen and I go out to Livermore nearly every day to see our horses and I enjoy the scenery as we cross the big undeveloped valley north of 580. I had been noticing a barn along May School Road as a potential painting subject, and one afternoon when I stopped to get a photo, there were also a couple of sheep grazing nearby in the wet field. I am quite pleased with the result, and I think it is one of my better paintings.
In my class, we worked on a springtime scene with poppies and green hills. The background is based on one of Ron's photos from Sunol Regional Wilderness, and the poppies from another photo. I recently went hiking at Sunol and enjoyed many scenes like this, so this was fun to do. I had done several paintings with poppies before and remembered that I had wished I had made the grass darker so that the poppies would stand out more, so I did that in this painting and it worked quite well.
