My Palette

By the way, this is my palette while I was working on the background town. Those paints are burnt umber, quinacridone red, yellow orchre, hansa yellow light, ultra marine blue, cobalt blue, and Utrecht white(mixture of titanium white and zinc white). It's quite simple and clean if you compare it with regular artist palettes. I tend not to make many colors one time and use the same, or a little tinted/darkened, colors in multiple areas on canvas. Which is good and bad. It would give viewers more easing feeling because viewer can see color patterns on one painting. But it might fall into a pit like monotonous or dull result. Or at least I need to take more time to clean up the palette to make different types of colors. But it's also necessary because I want to make more amount of color mixtures to make layers of paint a little more thicker than I use to make. To do that, I need more surface on my palette for one mixture.

Anyhow, this is how I make colors now.

I wanna finish this piece...

This would be the final update for this Wenatchee painting. The background hill started getting too realistic even though the layers of paints don't really overlap and you can see almost all layers just like collage if you take a close look at it. I need to stop working on that part.

I'm going to refine some details of trees' highlighted part and the town behind them. Then less-darken the shadow of trees and add some color variations to the water. That's about it to finish this piece.

Not see the forest for the trees...

Maybe I'm too concerned about the detail of the trees. I guess it's about time to step back and stay away from the area where I've been working on.

I'll go back to the background hill and finish it first. There are still some areas where I can see the underpainting layer. Then I can come back again to the tree area to finish this piece. It's taking too much time.

Another Hot Day in Yakima Valley

I stayed Yakima last night then this morning drove through Union Gap along Route 97 and made a right turn toward west. I kept driving west bound a while to get to almost at the end of Medicine Valley. Beyond there, no more paved roads into Yakima Indian Reservation.

On the road side, there were cattle and horse ranches and a lot of hay fields. I first thought I would paint hay fields with sprinklers sprinkling water from the typical "rolling" systems. But I changed my mind.

The composition and even colors are unintentionally similar to "East of the Mountains". The mountain in this is, of course, Mt. Adams. This one has more green in the middle range though.