The Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society met at Ardenwood Historic Park for the weekend paintsite, and what fun it was! The place had tons of things to sketch and paint - from cows, sheep, goats, rabbits to historic barns and buildings and farms. There is also a fair bit of opportunity to do people sketching, as the place was plenty packed.
I was excited about bales of hay in a barn so I set myself up right in front of it and painted this. I enjoyed trying to capture the backlighting. The design probably needs a good bit of work, but hey one thing at a time :-)
I then turned my attention to the sun beating down on the tin roof of another bark across the park. I liked the lights and darks and deep oranges of the barn, so I just went for it. You can see that the second painting was so much looser than the first one.
The place was actually filled with people and my only regret is that I couldn't get any human figures into the painting.
Then we relocated to another part if the park with views of the farms. Even though the beautiful perspective lines in the farm was what attracted me to it, I looked around and was even more inspired by this fence.
I am happy with the painting but I wasn't able to reflect the light conditions as well as I wish. The last painting was mostly under an overcast sky and I wish I could have had more cooler colors in there to reflect that.
I also did a few sketches of the farm animals and fellow sketchers in my epsilon sketchbook.
All in all, it was a great day painting.