The Vistas and Vineyards Plein Air group visited a beautiful farm out in Kings Valley recently, and although it started out cloudy, the sky cleared just before noon, just enough to capture some photos of the changing light, so I could attempt to paint them in. After walking around, admiring many different possible views, I decided to paint the front of the picturesque house.
First I drew the house on Yupo paper.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the first layers of watercolor. Possibly because I was dissatisfied with how it was going. I washed off a lot of the watercolor, and decided to fix some of the perspective issues that were bothering me.
Then, because I wasn’t content with watercolor on this painting I decided to pull some new tubes of Open Acrylic paint and see how they worked.
Not happy with how long they took to dry on the Yupo paper, I switched to regular acrylic paints.
The finished painting is presently on display at The LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State Campus in the annual Vista and Vineyards art show. If you happen to swing by, it’s at the far end of the hall, on the furthest west wall. Two other paintings of mine were chosen to be in this show, which I’ll share in upcoming posts.
Jana R. Johnson, Artist 