Art Night

A few years ago I was lucky to have met a very nice and talented interior designer, Sue Lyn, while taking a drawing class at the local Community College.   Sue Lyn graciously allowed our class to use her beautiful backyard retreat as our class room for that summer. Perhaps this summer I'll do a post about her yard alone, it is delightful. Sue Lyn and I became instant friends and continue to meet as our schedules allow, to have "Art Nights".  We schedule these nights to ensure we have some fun, creative time to practice our craft, as well as a little red vino.  We met last night for the first time in quiet a while and it was great to catch up with her.  I packed in a hurry for our get together and didn't bring a lot of supplies or paper, this actually worked out well.  I am currently on an Imaginary Trip to Paris, so I grabbed my travel art kit and a packet of prepped watercolor papers, knowing that I wouldn't need any more than that to be able to create.  I was surprised to find that all of the watercolor papers had previous works started on them, most random washes and splashes of color from a class long ago.  I had no sketch pad or blank paper.  I was in the mood to color anyway, so I picked out an ugly painting I did in an en plein air class of an old tree.  I've always disliked this image but thought I could play with it and see if I could make it better.  I was sure there was no way to make something nice of this scene.  The tree was a very dark blue/purple and the 3 layers of land around it were very bright green and yellow/green.  One other time I had tried to make something of it by adding lines with a gold marker, without much success. Looking at the color wheel, I couldn't see a way to make this work.  I had no other choice, so I started to work.  I liked a bird and branch clock that Sue Lyn had on the desk in front of me so I  incorporated that into the picture.  Over the course of 3 hours the painting and the colors changed. I can't believe it's the same piece I started with and wish I had taken a before picture. The scanned image doesn't show the yellow glow well.

I'm not sure that it's done  But I'm amazed at where its at now, I don't know that I'll do anything more on it for a while.