Tuesday morning, August 15, 2017
It’s another beautiful morning. After looking yet again at the list of potential private residences to paint at, I zoom in on a barn and farmhouse that’s no longer being lived in. I strolled the grounds and found quite a few subjects to paint. It’s such a striking barn and silo, I decide to make it the main subject. I set up on the corner of the property so I could take in as much of it as possible. Below is the sketch I made to start using a thin version and thick version of brown acrylic paint markers on my toned panel.
The next 3 hours were spent painting the beautiful old barn surrounded in multi-colored weeds and wildflowers. I scraped and repainted the silo a few times. Getting a cylindrical feel to it turned out to be difficult using just a knife to paint with. Here’s my finished painting on the easel.
I used the rest of the afternoon to grab some lunch and drive around Dexter to scout out future locales to paint the next day.
Tuesday evening, August 15, 2017
I didn’t have time for a second painting, because there was a reception in the early evening at Null Taphouse for the artists to meet one another. (Their Beam Me Up Scotty is delicious.) I already knew a few of the talented artists there already like Tamera Ovall, Janice Dumas, and Pam Siegfried from painting with the Michigan Plein Air Painters. Now I got to meet some artists in person that I only knew from Facebook like Priscilla Olson, Cornelis vanSpronsen, and Jill Stefani Wagner.
At the end of the event, Jill invited me to join her and a few artists to paint a nocturne. This is something I’d never done before but was very eager to try. In fact, I bought a reading clip lamp from Barnes and Noble just for this purpose.
I quickly drove to my hotel to change and head back. The other artists had already started and I needed to catch up. In the middle park square was a statue of a Civil War soldier partially illuminated by a streetlamp. I didn’t have time to be too choosy and no one else was painting it, so I picked that. It was already pretty late when I started so I only painted it for about 90 minutes. By the time I finished it, only one artist was left, and he was already packing up. I knew I had to wake up extra early the next day for breakfast with the artists, so I stopped. In the dim light, it looked finished. When I brought it back to the hotel to sit in my drying rack, I was surprised that it looked better than I thought it would.
With that, my second day was over. It was great painting alongside other artists. Tamara Ovall invited me to join her and a few other artists to paint the next day. The camaraderie would be most welcome.
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