In the Woods

I fiddled in my little RX100 with this photo. I was on my way back home from a drawing and shooting outing. This week's assignment in my painting class is to do a landscape painting live, so I walked down to the estuary and stood by the road drawing the image, first in small form to get a sense of it, and then on my watercolor pad for the painting itself. I took some reference photos but the drawing was live, or en plein air as they say in France. 

It was chilly and gray today which doesn't hurt at all since there are some limits I have to stick to to meet the assignment. The painting can only have three values: middle gray, high dark and low light. These three are right next to each other in the value scale we use. So the whole painting will be pretty middle of the road value-wise. There are color restrictions too: the foreground in oranges, the middle ground in purples and the background in blues. Should be interesting and fun to achieve these requirements. I'm trying this out in watercolors which adds just one more challenge to the mix. But hay! Why not?