It's been a while. New year, new paintings, new post...

A lot has happened in the past few months. Back in January I took a 4-day workshop at the Scottsdale Artists School, with landscape painter Matt Smith. The workshop really opened up my eyes to some new ways of thinking, especially in regards to color. I've been experimenting with his palette, and while I like it, I had to make a couple modifications.

Matt Smith's palette:
Titanium white, cadmium lemon, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium orange, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, mauve blue shade, ultramarine, cobalt blue, cerulean blue hue, phthalo blue, viridian hue, Thalo yellow-green (Grumbaucher)

I dislike how this palette does not contain a warm red. You can mix one from orange and alizarin crimson, true, but it is not the same as a good, medium red. I also hate phthalo blue with a passion. It gets everywhere and ruins your mixtures. Cerulean blue hue is a mixture of phthalo and zinc white, and since there is so much white the tinting strength of the phthalo has been knocked down. I can justify using that. Viridian hue is made from phthalo green, which has a much higher tinting strength than real viridian. I prefer to go with the pure stuff.

Anyway, here is my improved palette (In the order I arrange them on my palette)
Titanium white, cadmium lemon, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium orange, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, bright red (Winsor and Newton), quinacridone rose, alizarin crimson, mauve blue shade, ultramarine, cobalt blue, cerulean blue hue, viridian, yellow-green (Utrecht).

This one is a 24x30 Studio painting. It's still not quite done. My camera really brings out the blue in this painting. It's not that blue, but one of the things on my list of improvements is to dull down the blue shadows a bit.

I've also been doing more plein air painting. Speaking of which, I will be going to the Plein Air convention in Monterey, California in April. I'm really excited for it. 5 days of painting and learning. I'm also taking an extra few days to do some painting on my own. Can't wait.

Anyway, here are some recent plein air paintings. I spent maybe an hour on each sketch. 9x12 panels, painted in my Guerrilla box easel.

I also took this photo for fun, just to see how well my painting matched up. This is in Sedona, AZ

That's it for now. I'm going to try to update this thing a little more often.