My Very First Plein Air Painting

Ever since I moved back to CT, I’ve wanted to paint this view:

I have this idea to paint the view every day during the month of October to record the changing of the leaves from green to vibrant.

Yesterday, I finally did my first Plein Air Painting.

It was wonderful.

Sure it was a pain to haul my gear to the spot on a local trail. But as I sat and painted, it was sublime. I think this might be why people do plein air painting. It was such a nice day and I could get lost in my painting. No one was around…which is always a plus. Ok, one man walked past me just as I was almost to my spot. He came back 20 minutes or so later when I was well into the painting. He didn’t gawk and talk. He just said hi and walked on by.

I was all set up but I couldn’t find the 8x10 canvas board that I had prepped. I swear I had placed the canvas board inside my folding easel, but it wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to walk back to the car to get it, so I used the cardboard from my palette paper to paint on.

I was going to coat it in a layer of burnt sienna to tone it, when I realized the cardboard color already made it a toned surface. So I just went for it.

I used a chalk pencil to laying in large shapes. I think for today’s painting, I need to put some more time into the initial lay in of shapes.

Then I started with the path. I added some prominent upright trunks and then moved into leaves. At first I was almost painting the individual leaves. But then I started blocking out tree shapes.

It was getting pretty muddled when I remember my professor from school teaching me to add in sky holes through the leaves.

I had a problem, I had not packed any blue. I searched through the colors I had brought, however, and found Pthalo Green (blue shade). I always wondered why they put “blue shade” on a green paint. hmmm….maybe because if you mix in enough white, it looks blue….

It worked. The painting went from muddled to interesting with a few well placed sky holes in my painting.

I had carved out 2 hours for me to work on it, but after a little over an hour, I felt it was done.

Sure I could have painted over my mistakes and still worked on it until the drawing problems that I knew were there were fixed, but it might end up over worked and the plan is to paint this spot again today.

And I think it’s not bad for a first attempt at Plein Air Painting on the back of the palette paper with no blue in my paint tubes.

What do you think?