A little more coverage

Still trying to cover more area at this moment and not worrying much about the colors but just to make values about right. I'll push more tomorrow.

"Staining" stage for the Glacier painting

Jim Lamb once told to students at a workshop to use more paint, or enough paint pigments, to cover the canvas otherwise you would be just "staining" it. But that's exactly what I'm doing now.
I just want to get some sense of color coordination at this early stage instead of committing to each color I put as the bottom layer. When I decided on this composition, I felt this would be more about the clouds than either mountains or the lake.

2nd Plein Air in 2017

I actually painted in Olympia last weekend, which was the first of the year. Today I rode to Fall City and got to the point along SR-203 I took some photos several years ago. This time I wanted to paint. The water body is an oxbow lake created by Snoqualmie River. It's a good marsh where I saw a hawk-like bird and a blue heron gliding in the sky looking for fish, or small animals.
The part of water was covered by lotus, which made a little difficult to paint. But I felt I'm getting better. 

New Glacier NP Painting

After came back from Japan, I started drawing this. It's about the slow movement of clouds. So drew solid cloud shapes in detail. Mountains are about contrast of lighted area and cast shadow area by the clouds. There are trees in the foreground but I'll try not to get too much attention to them.

Michael Story Workshop - outcome

This is the outcome of Day2. Out of this image you can't see much of the initial process showing through because I covered most of the part completely. Sky and clouds are the same with what I would do to my regular paintings. I never used outside of three primaries, alizarin, ultra-marine, and cad-yellow, which is not usual yellow though, and titanium white. As many other instructors Michael didn't comment on muck of my processes, which I took as my basics are ok.
But more imprtantly, HIS process of painting sky and clouds are just matching the color mixes with the reference and dubbing a brush to apply the color to each part. As any professional painters, he has his own way of skills and confidence mixing colors, which I need to learn more. 

Michael Story Workshop - Day 1

Yesterday I took a day off at work and attended to Day 1 of Michael Story's workshop at Winslow Art Center on Bainbridge Island.
His painting process starts with charcoal drowing on the painting surface. Then use fixative to fix charcoal on to the surface and cover it with Cad red light acrylic before start painting over.
To me it's similar to old Dutch masters' underpainting technique. Only difference is charcoal and fixative part. Above photo is my result of the first day, which I finished today.

Inconsisitency in value shifts

I spent some time last night to refine the shapes on the pyramid mountain. Now most of shapes are in place. However, I can clearly see inconsistency in value shifts from foreground toward background.
I really need to make the biggest shadow area of the front mountain darker, then front ground trees much more darker.