A wee bit of snow...

During the summer, I would go with my wife to the barn/arena/field where her horse is boarded, and get out a few times on my mountain bike. Oh, occasionally I’d paint, too. The weather recently hasn’t been great, but I went with her the other day. While she rode her horse, I painted, sometimes under the shield of the hatchback of the car while some rain fell. While I got rain, the mountains were getting some snow under low clouds. I loved how the mountains just gradually disappeared, and it gave me some good practice on how to blend without dragging darker paint into the lighter without making a travesty of the whole thing. I painted a couple quick studies, then spent a bit longer on the two you can see here.

This first one is small, only 4×6″, Oil on hardboard panel. The panel had a bit of texture to it, from some acrylic medium matte gel that I had scraped on with a palette knife. I like how the texture works out, as each painting on each panel has it’s own texture before I even begin to paint. That’s one thing I love about making my own panels.

The next and final one I painted that day is larger; 8×10″, oil on panel. In this case, the only texture was random brush marks left when I put on the last coat of acrylic gesso. I intentionally leave the brushmarks; I’m not one to sand everything to death. It’s obvious I’m not going for photographic detail in any of my work.

The view I painted is close to the first painting, only looking farther north, where the mountains faded into the horizon with the clouds. I went with a very low horizon on the canvas, only because the sky was more interesting than the foreground. I’m looking forward to painting another sky like this one. One could spend all day on the subtleties in the soft edges and grays. As it was, by the time I was wrapping up, the wet dirt and grass below my feet was turning into mud and it the gray clouds were getting dark. Oh, and my wife was done riding.