Sutter-Jensen Community Park

March 17, 2012 - After meeting Rose and her husband at William B Pond, a couple of fellow plein aire painters, I went home and looked up the Plein Aire Meet-Up group on the internet. (No, I don’t have a smart phone. Otherwise I would have done it right there!) The next meet-up was David Peterson’s Third Saturday Paint Out at some place called Sutter-Jensen Community Park. I had never heard of it before, so the explorer in me found this to be a great new adventure.  

The weather was overcast and cold, and it was earlier in the morning than I usually paint. It was a beautiful undeveloped space with a community garden on one side.  There were several other artists already painting.  I tried not to be intimidated by what they were doing and focused on my own creativity.  I wandered out into a dew-covered grassy field, totally saturating my shoes, and realized I was NOT going to sit down in the grass to paint; otherwise my pants would suffer the same fate.  As I was standing out there getting an idea of what I was going to paint, so guy yells “Hey! You’re outstanding in your field!” As corny as it was, that gave me a boost of confidence!  Luckily, I spotted a chair over by the garden, and ran over and grabbed it and got to work.  

The idea with this painting was to see how many different shades of green I could produce to recreate the pastoral scene (it was St. Patrick's Day, after all!).  I keep saying that I need to develop a better style with trees, and what better place. As always, I started with my blue sky (a little artistic license, since I didn’t want the actual gray sky in my painting). I experimented with some paint-lifting with a towel to create a little texture to imply clouds.  Then, the mixing of color begins—blue-green, yellow-green, brown-green, and everything in between. It got a little muddy in the middle, mostly because I was too impatient to wait for the paint to dry before adding more layers. I do like some of the effects I got with the wet on wet, though.  The “pole” in the middle of the field becomes the focus of this painting because of the white space I left around it.  It was one of the first details that I painted in the foreground.  I think that it should have been added in at the end, after the grass had dried (the grass in the painting, that is). That is one of the challenges of watercolor though…trying to figure out what details need to be laid out first and what can wait to be added in at the end.  One of the other painters there was using “masking paint”, a wax that covers areas of the paper that you want to keep white. I’ll have to look into that.

 I’m also still trying to figure out my style with the edge of the painting: all the way to the edge like the top edge,  a distinctive edge of the painting away from the edge of the paper like the bottom, or somewhere in between like the sides. With this particular painting, I really like the way the bottom edge turned out.

As I wrapped up my first outing with the Plein Aire Meet-up group, I found that I did more observing the other artists than painting. But that is what this journey is all about: learning from like-minded artists with a passion for creativity!