Plein Air Painting

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I went up into the mountains to paint with a friend and this is the result. Plein air painting is always an educational experience and one that I enjoy very much. We walked around for a while looking at different settings and then decided to set up in the coldest place we could find. Go figure. Once we started painting I forgot about the cold and concentrated on getting some painting done before my water supply froze.

First I painted a gray background, using a mixture of cerulean blue and brilliant orange, to separate it from the white snow and the white aspen trees. Next, I added some distant trees into that gray with burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue. Moving down to the snow on the hillside, I left unpainted white paper with a few brush strokes of the same gray used in the background along with a little yellow ochre to warm it up. The shadow side of the aspen trees is a mixture of cobalt violet and yellow ochre plus some of the previous gray mixture and their dark markings are burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue. The two evergreen trees were painted with perylene green plus olive.

There was one area on the hillside where the snow had melted and I painted that with the same burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue. This dark shape helps to explain the the sloping hillside and also leads the eye into the aspen trees. Burnt sienna and yellow ochre were used for the bush and the dark branches are the same mixture of burnt sienna and blue used previously. You can see where I scratched out a few branches while the paint was still wet.

As I look at this painting now I see a few changes that I think would make it work better. First, I could have used sone opaque white paint to add some snow on the evergreen trees. Next I could have left a little more white paper showing through the bush along with some white paint on its branches. Finally I wish I had spattered some white paint on that bush and added some violet to the gray background.

When I return to my studio after painting on location I think carefully before making any changes because there is always the risk of loosing that freshness that comes from painting outdoors. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton