"View from the Lake House", 16x20, oil, colorist art, Lake Glenville North Carolina, Cashiers, lake scene, view form the porch, mountains, lake, Blue Ridge Mountains

 "View from the Lake House", 16x20, oil (Click on image in order to see a close up)

So if you have been reading my blog, we recently took a trip into the Blue Ridge mountains in southwestern North Carolina. It was a very short trip, but nice nonetheless because it inspired me to do a plein air painting (3 actually) for the first time in close to three years.

The weather didn't cooperate, so I had to be content with rainy/ cloudy/foggy views of beautiful Lake Glenville, as seen from the deck of our airbnb.

The wonderful thing was that I was under a roof and both myself and my painting were totally protected from the elements.

Lake Glenville has an elevation of about 3400 feet, and is just a few miles from Cashiers. I just found out that there is a plein air invitational in Cashiers every other year, and this year I know quite a few of the invited artists, so maybe we'll go back up in mid-July for that event.

Evidently this area is actually a rain forest environment with weather like what we experienced pretty common. But being an artist that prefers sunny day scenes, when I got home I decided to try my hand at turning the scene into a brighter and more colorful one.

So I played around a little with the editing tools on my Mac, and used that and my plein air sketch to have a go of it. Here you can see the painting in progress.

As you can see, my first notes were basically saturated color. I eventually covered much of the saturated color with local color, but kept enough of the first notes showing through to give the painting a colorist impression.

This painting was a lot of fun to do. I think it helps tremendously to do a smaller plein air sketch first to get the feeling of the scene.

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