We spent five days in the Mammoth Lakes area in September, and the first day of class I chose to do something based on a photo that I took there. One day we hiked up to Arrowhead Lake, and found this beautiful spot for Darby to play in the water. Now that he is eleven years old, he doesn't want to chase a stick into the water all day, but he is still up for a few times. I always find painting water quite a challenge, but I think I did pretty well with this one.
Our first class project was to paint something for a holiday card. I had painted a snow scene with a little stream a few months ago, and thought I could do something similar and add in a group of three bucks from a photo that I took when we were horse camping in August. It came out all right, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it so I decided to try something else.
Last February we had a family weekend in the snow near Bear Valley. One day while the grandkids were busy sliding down hills, I walked up to the top of the hill to see what I could see and took a photo of the view. I used it for this painting by adding some color to the sky, which was mostly gray, and putting lights on the little tree. I think this is the one that we will use for cards this year.
Now that I have been in the painting class for several years, I am finding that some projects keep repeating. Every fall we have done something with fall colors and aspens or birches with white trunks. It's a lesson on the use of masking fluid with watercolor. I guess I am getting a bit tired of this kind of thing. I didn't get very excited about it, though I went ahead and painted it anyway. It's not one of my favorites.
Then we did another fall scene, with an old mill. I got much more into this one because I liked the photo that we worked from. It had lots of pretty leaves in the foreground. Ron painted it as a distant scene without the foreground leaves, but I wanted to try to get them into my painting. It was a bit more challenging to do it that way, but I think I did it pretty well. It's my favorite of all the paintings I have done recently.
