Painting In Progress: Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge

Returning to a painting after beginning

Today I returned to a painting I began in the spring. It has been standing silently behind my desk chair on a very tall easel, not without intimidation!

In any case, I got back into it today and did something RISKY, which is that I started painting dark parts… Switching values always trips me up after I’ve gotten used to something looking a certain way for a while. This one was especially tense because I’m trying to paint a reflection in a watercress-filled stream in winter, which is already very unusual looking.

I thought I’d take a timelapse video of my painting session today, which I did. It’s weird to see 2 hours of painting condensed into 20 seconds:

And here are some images of the parts of the painting I was focused on today:

I can’t tell yet if the water is successful, I’ll need to complete the whole painting to really know. I appreciate how my paintings tend to fall apart in my understanding of them while I work. If this one turns out to be an indecipherable mass of pattern and color I think that’ll be fine, too. :-)

In case you’re curious, I’m using a mixture of watercolor and gouache on bristol board.

Thanks for being here!
Sara

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