Progress

A few weeks ago I gave myself a short project. What happens if I paint the same scene everyday for a week. I decided I would squint my eyes and just paint the colors that I see in wet watercolor. This is the scene from the desk where I paint. There is a field of very tall corn with golden tassels, beyond that there is a soybean field and then a couple of barns and way in the distance there are trees. I have noticed that the colors change from hour to hour and day to day depending on the time and the weather. I masked off two squares in my watercolor sketchbook  and painted the first one. The next day I tried again. I made sure to note the time of day and the weather on the bottom of each painting.

On the third day I feel like I was making progress and there were some nice puffy clouds in the sky to paint. You can really see how the colors change day to day by now. I tried to paint them as true as possible. My masking tape was taking a layer of paper with it when I peeled it off so on the fifth day I used blue painter's tape from Dollar Tree and that worked much better.

I am very happy with the painting I did on the fifth day. I feel like I really made a lot of progress in a short amount of time. Imagine what could happen if I had kept on going. After the fifth day my sciatic nerve really started bothering me and I couldn't walk up and down the stairs as easily so the project stopped. I am going to physical therapy now and slowly getting better. I did a couple of "plein air" paintings from car last week so I am still painting just not walking as far to do it. 

Here is a photo of the actual scene. I used my artistic license to cut out the trees to make things a little easier on myself. I tried to paint the scene a couple of times when we first moved here with the trees and I never liked the way it looked.