A little progress

Not much but I'm making some progress on highlighted mountains by putting more color/value variations. Before getting into too much details, I'll move to the clouds.

Next Animal Piece

I finished "Porsche" on the last day of July. Then recently an old friend of mine in Japan contacted me and offered buying two horse paintings; "White Horses" and "Side by Side". Now I need to paint more animal paintings, especially horse paintings. So I picked this photo I took at the county fairground in Langley on Whidbey Island. This is actually a horse and a girl in an appear-to-be local competition. I liked the angle the horse and girl were leaning in while they were making two 360 degree turns around a pole. The horse's right hind leg is blurred in the photo due to the fast movement, which could be a good challenge for me.

Will work on the background a while...

Why I didn't update on this was because I couldn't make much progress due to my struggle with the fur colors and texture. I still don't have good ideas about those. Until I can feel brave enough I'll keep working on the background colors and texture, which are also not too easy. Most of them are in shadowed area.

Pushed values

Ok, this is much more closer to the final values. Highlighted part of background mountains could be a little lighter but once I put more colors I probably don't have to change values much. It's time to change the brush.

Dragon Cloud:Initial Blocking

After the drawing, I changed the brush to a 1inch inexpensive one, as Jim L regularly does, and started blocking bigger shapes. Although the values are not quite right (most of foreground is shadowed part) all canvas has been covered by now. I'll keep using the same brush and adjusting values before getting into the details.

Dragon Cloud: Rough Sketch

Next landscape is from the same trip near Riverside, WA. I couldn't forget about the long thick cloud hovering above the highway and the mountains, which looked as if a dragon was flying above.
16"x24". I started with cool underpaint and drew rough shapes over.

Plein Air at Ridgefield

I suddenly decided going Portland at Fri night to see their current exhibit for California Impressionism. It was really good. Then on the way back stopped by Ridgefield WA for lunch and painted the wildlife refuge area from an overlook park. I think I handled the highlighted green part better than before but I don't think the shadow part was not dark enough. Next time I'll mix dark color before painting so that I won't lose dark values on my palette, which is difficult to keep once started mixing with white.