Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Plein Air Mondays

Now that I am a full time artist (re: no longer working at Yahoo! and working as a freelance painter and Icon Designer) I can finally, FINALLY, join my Plein Air Painting group for Monday paint-outs!!

I joined the LGAA, Los Gatos Art Association, about 2 years ago, specifically because they had regular, organized Plein Air outings. In my excitement, if I'd bothered to carefully read the fine print, I would have seen that these outings were on Mondays. Not conducive to a full-time work schedule.

Now, post Yahoo! layoff... I am free free free to finally participate. And I am loving it!

One of my favorite recent outings was a visit to the Santa Cruz harbor and the SeaCliff lighthouse:

Each visit out I am learning more about light, composition, paint application and equipment! I am still fiddling with which pochade, which turp, which gear to bring out on these Mondays. Here I was using my Guerilla Pochade, French Resistance, with a plastic palette tray. This is a my go-to set up, on a standard camera tripod. Not heavy. Not too small. Not too big.

The next week I decided to try out my half french easel.  I haven't used this easel, except in my studio as a table top easel, in a long while, so in an effort to carry less and also wanting to use my new Fine Art Tech palette, I packed up the Julian Half French.

It's still a great system. I do love the French easels!
On this Monday we met out at Coyote Lake near Morgan Hill. I used a piece of plexi-glass for my palette. I prefer a glass palette so knew I'd have to work on that later. Otherwise, the system worked pretty well. I did forget clamps to hold my turp as well as secure my garbage bag for soiled paper towels. I put that all in a note-to-self to remember for next time.

Here's my set up and my finished painting from Coyote Lake:

No comments:

Post a Comment