5" x 7"s on masonite gessoboards. I spent my Sunday over at Hahamongna Watershed Park, off the 210 near Art Center College of Design, for a plein air landscape painting workshop led by Tim Solliday. His primary focus for the class was to capture the conditions and tone of light and not necessarily dwell on the details. Thus, there was a great deal of emphasis on the fundamentals, namely - big shapes before small; warms advancing and cools receding; keeping a coherent value structure between the foreground, middle distance, and background; striving for a circular or figure-eight composition, and so on and so forth.
I whipped up the first painting in a little over a couple of hours, which is a bit embarrassing to admit, because it doesn't look like much for all that time spent. After Tim worked his magic on my sketch and passed along a few helpful pointers, I ran off to another spot while we still had light and painted a second composition - in fifteen minutes flat. I don't have a developed enough eye at the moment to tell you if it ended up being better than the first, but at least I realized I shouldn't have to take so long to reach a similar level of finish.
I'd like to do more sketches in the weeks to come; it's always a pleasure to be painting in the great outdoors.
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