Art Road trip - Day 3 (recap)

Woke up early to get a head start on the weather (and daylight) -- walked down the beach to scout the conditions for painting and determined that it was worth me lugging all of my plein air supplies from my car to the location (about .5 mile walk -- to get close enough to 'Haystack Rock' for the view I was looking to capture via oils)

Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach

As I got back to my car to grab my supplies -- it started raining!? (go figure!) The sky conditions didn't change and there was no warning signs of rain.. yet somehow Mother Nature decided to 'let go' then and there! So.. i walked over to a nearby coffeehouse to wait it out.

Bald Eagle Coffee house

Passing the time - waiting for rain to stop!

About 40 minutes later -- the rain stopped and off I went!

I set my easel up with a nice view/composition and prepared my palette and supplies (which takes about 5-10 min to squeeze out paints, get my brushes set out, etc). I use a small view finder that has a sliding door -- and hold that in front of me as I survey the scene. As I'm looking through this, I am making key marks on the canvas, to lay out the composition. This can take anywhere from 5-10 min to 30 minutes, depending on the complexity of the scene. In this case, It took perhaps 20 min as I was working on getting a correct silhouette of the rock formation (which was a bit tricky, believe it or not!) I also had to consider how much of the surrounding rock formations to include, where the beach would come into the picture, etc.

In the end, the weather held off for about 1.5 hours -- which allowed me to get a fairly good representation of what I waned to capture. More importantly, I was able to study the lighting conditions, the textures and the localized colors that were before me -- all in preparation (as a study) for a future painting that I'll create back in my studio. (and that's my real goal, here.. to study things/to observe)

'Haystack Rock' - oils on 9x12 canvas panel

I went back to my room, unloaded my supplies and went to grab lunch -- hoping that I'd have 1 more chance to head back out to paint in the afternoon.

Unfortunately -- this didn't happen. The weather took a turn for the worse and severe winds/rain moved in and lasted the entire afternoon, until darkness fall upon the area.

I made the most of my down time, though.. read quite a bit of my new book, 'Alla Prima 2' by Richard Schmid (the gospel of art teaching!) -- man, that guy is amazing! He is the most inspirational artist and has had profound influence on my work and why I love to paint landscapes! I was also able to do some digital artwork and even relax a bit!