Plein Air - Week 1

I'm going to spend the next few weeks focusing on loosening up my style, and painting outdoors. This will really force me to work on some of the things that I'm not good at, particularly perspective, composition, sketching, painting plants and buildings... pretty much everything!

Recently I've been using a lot of paintings or photos as my source, and it will be good for me to simplify real scenes.

This first warm-up I did at home, and I was just trying to paint loose and relaxed. I'm including it here because I think it may be the best sky I've ever done. I wish I could remember my trick! The rock and the figure are hideous, but you get to see them because I like the sky so much. :)

And here are a couple of things I did on lunch-breaks. The first one is at a park really close to work and I will probably continue to paint scenes from there quite a bit because it's quiet and quick to get to. This house is supposed to be a cube, with the front corner right in the center of the picture. It just looks flat though. The only thing I kind of like about this one is the lower left corner, which was just a fluke because there's no pond here in real life.

I don't think I'm going to ever finish the second.  I spent quite a while on it and it has a couple of nice things and some unfortunate things as well, but when you don't finish your outdoor painting and didn't bring a camera it's definitely challenging to try to recreate it from memory.