The rediscovery of my love for Plein Air Painting is now complete. I spent 2 weeks driving around Coeur d’Alene ID and painting outside. The beauty of where we live has brought my artist’s soul back to life. The art expedition involved multiple trips, cruising around, and sightseeing till I noticed a great view. Then, stopping to hop out, set up the easel, and paint my heart out.
3 Paintings
This was the first plein air I did during the art expedition. An old barn stopped me on the road and I had to back up to go see it. The old barn won an honorable mention ribbon and was the first painting sold in our booth.
I pulled into a slow vehicle turn out to let traffic go by, and this guy greeted me right up front and center. What a personality this tree stump has. He didn’t win a ribbon but there was one young man who fell in love with it. He went off and brought back his whole family to vote for it as the people’s choice.
This painting won the “People’s Choice” award for the plein air booth. Bloomin Wet is a close-up view from the bank of the water full of blooming lily pods, grasses, reeds, and lots of mosquitos.
1 Demo Painting
As described in a previous post, I did a demo of plein air painting from some fresh sunflowers in the booth during the Art on the Green show.
This small 4″ x 4″ demo sold. There is another partially done one that I intend to finish in the studio. I’ll share about that when it is done.
We received a surprise treasure in the mail today. It is a perfect rendering of a magnificent ‘BLUEBIRD DAY OF SKIING” at 
Huckleberry Moose H3906 is painted on a 5-foot diameter wooden electrical spool using acrylic house paints. At the Stanek’s Nursery “Fall Living” art event in 2006, I was one of the invited artists. The whole idea was to allow artists creating “garden art” to visit with the shoppers at the nursery during the show.
There is a clear definition of who is who in the two characters in the dinosaur fight at this point. So, my focus moves to the use of my watercolor pencils to render foliage, grasses, and outlines along the darkest edges of the animals. When you look at the lines created with the pencils here they seem very dull but wait till you see how a little spray of water brings the color vibrancy right up.
After a simple spray from my water mister, the colors start to show so very bright. I am able to blend and move the color any way I’d like with my watercolor brushes from here. 
The next step for me is to put a pallet of acrylic paints to make final details with. The brightest highlights are first. Then careful rounding of the teeth surfaces, dotting of the skin scales and delicate whites of their eyes. It is amazing to watch how careful changes in water content change the opacity of the acrylic paint. I can have a fully opaque or transparent application with just a minor change in water content.
The last two images show how the foreground can be loosely finished using a combination of watercolor pencil strokes and paint strokes to help fill it all in. 
I ended up giving this dinosaur painting to a grand-nephew visiting us named Jonah. The finished painting can be seen anytime at the artist’s 
Welcome to Dinosaur 01 tutorial. Dinosaurs are a subject that I have illustrated previously. Here is the initial sketch of a dinosaur layout.
You can see the horizon line skyline wash and the neutral ground surface watercolor wash outlining where they are standing. I thought a Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex facing off would be interesting subjects to paint. I imagine an armored vegetarian with a spiked tail facing off with a ferocious meat-eater that has tiny little front arms.
Even though the basic reptile skin will be in greens I use a red or brown base to lay in where the darker shadows will be on their body forms first.
Beginning with T-Rex’s body surfaces it immediately becomes apparent that the tail of Mr. Stegosaurus could easily get real lost in all the T-Rex surfaces in the immediate vicinity. So, I find myself being really careful about how I keep the two separated.
I use different colors to separate their surfaces. A sepia brown-based green on T-Rex makes a noticeable difference between his tail behind. The horned tail of the Stegosaurus is darkened with magenta around his armor plates.
I used a piece of cardboard saved from an appliance box that I cut into flat sheets to paint a Halloween scene. First, laying out a scarecrow sitting on a fence rail with his feet on a large pumpkin and of course a black cat right next to him.
Using pencil and then charcoal my layout lines are drawn well enough to serve as guides for painting to proceed. Painting with acrylics the background area is filled in showing better outlines of the other characters.
Then it is simply a process of finishing all the other items from top to bottom.
We went to the
First a Watercolor Sketch
