Red Light, Red Light, Paris

Finished one up today. I've hardly had time to paint with my schedule lately. Good family time has taken priority, classes too. Last Thursday seventeen of us visited the Edgar Payne Exhibit at the Crocker Art  Museum. We sketched, we studied, we put our noses in up close. We talked about the large value shapes, paying more attention to the dark value patterns. These are the things we've been talking about in class and this was the perfect opportunity to bring the point home.
We also purchased Payne books. The Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne is extremely useful for those painters who want to paint landscape paintings and/or plein air paintings. I learned from my teacher Brigitte Curt to do an exercise using the thumbnails in the back of the book. Sketch from the thumbnail sketches in the book but sketch each one three times, changing the composition to work in different ways. In this exercise you will learn to compose a landscape while also learning how to design....
Go to http://classart.org/E_PayneExercise.html   for
 a more detailed description.