Stone Arch Bridge

The best type of day is when you have painted something that you like or mostly like. The next best type of day is when you've painted something you don't like, followed by the worst type of day when you haven't painted at all. This doesn't mean each day has to result in a finished painting, just that something painting-related occurred, since I have to keep reminding myself that painting does not include just the time you have paint on your brush.

This is today's painting. There is more that I like about it than I don't, which is a big deal for me for a landscape painting. The best part is that there is a background, middle ground and foreground. I don't know how it happened or how to try and do this next time. It might be a combination of the background greenery being really dark, plus looking to see the outline of the foreground greenery and trying to keep it distinct (thanks Kat for the feedback in last week's class).

The values seem truer to me than what I've been doing lately and that helps cover for the fact that some of my colors are off. I wish I would have made the lightest bits under the bridge a warmer color, but I fussed with this enough. At least, I can look at it and say "that should have been a warmer color". As far as the water is concerned, I'm trying to see different colors, so I picked a picture which had some readily apparent differences. While I don't like my paint strokes for the water, I do like them for the trees. At first, the bridge railings looked to fussy to me, but I'm starting to like them.

#225 - Stone Arch Bridge - 8" x 8" - paper