Plein air at Bowman Bay

The weather/temperature was too good not to go out for painting over Easter weekend. Unfortunately my motorcycle has been broken down since Nov, I drove my car and stayed at a motel in Mount Vernon last night then went to Rosario Beach/Bowman Bay this morning. I took a lot of photos from the trail from the parking lot at Rosario Bay to Bowman Bay. Then set up my easel on the trail. I still don't have enough skills to make the color of distant mountains and dark colored see in background, and obviously don't know how to paint madrona trees. Also the rocks in the foreground is not realistic enough. I couldn't get  shapes, values, and colors right. But this is the first of this year. I just need to keep trying.
One thing I've learned with this plain air session was how to color the canvas with paints more effectively. I need to mix with more paints with a palette knife. Although the color is not quite right for Olympic mountains, it has consistently thick enough because I mixed a batch of the color.

Half decided what to do with grids

While I was adjusting the shapes further on this, I kind of decided I would change the color theme for the surrounding panes. Since the center pane would be much realistic colors, I would make the others more monotonous as I quickly tried on the horse head here. I made everything reddish while keeping values.
It's quite interesting how human eyes compensate colors although they're NOT there.
I might change my mind later but I'll try this way, for now.

Will stay away from background hill a while

Roughly got desired values for the sun-lit background hills. I would adjust some colors and highlighted smaller shapes later. But basically it's done.
Next, I would work on the focal point: Burrows Island.

Adjusting values in background hills

I came back to the background hills and adjusted values and colors to be lighter. To see the balance, I had to fill the water colors and half-filled the sky. I think it's getting close to the final values&colors. The paints I'm putting on are now thicker. I have to push them around with #6 flat brush.

something is wrong in shapes

With a 1" brush I filled major part of canvas with a thin layer of colors. The grids are helping me to place shapes in proper positions. However, by the time I got this point I realized something was wrong in shapes for the saddle cushions. I'll fix them next.
I'm still undecided what I would do with the grids at the end.

Started putting lightest values

I just put some lightest values in foreground area. Now I can see the background hills are too dark compared to the darkest shadows on the island. I'll spend a little more time on the foreground before going back to the background, or put more colors on the water surface.

added values, colors, shapes to background hills

Worked on a little more on the background hills. Added more colors to place the shapes in the right positions. Next would be the front ground, which has more sharp shapes since they're very close to viewers eyes. I want to enhance the shape of the dead tree as well.

Starting a new idea

While I was walking around downtown Seattle at the first Thursday night for artwalk, something popped up in my mind and got stuck there throughout the night, which is something to do with unnatural shapes like rectangles and polygons or circles and ovals, which never exist in natural world I've been painting.
At this moment it's still a vague idea and not sure what to do with it. But I put grids on this painting after finishing more-detailed-than-usual drawing. Then started blocking dark part, carefully not to erase the grid lines. These lines would help me placing shapes at proper positions too, I hope. Will need to wait more what I want to do with them.

Drawing another horse

Started drawing another horse on 20x24 canvas. It's a little bigger than previous Aiming a Sharp Turn. But this has entire frank of the horse. So it had to be wider. I'll put a nose of another horse in the race on the left. The title would be Dash.