Step Carefully

20x16", water mixable oil on board, 7/15/15

This is a painting from a photograph (taken last fall in Yellowstone National Park) of my husband and daughter walking down some steps coming down from the artist paint pots. I love how my husband is reaching his hand out for my daughter to hold, while she determinedly keeps stepping forward, doing it all by herself :)

This painting was a bit of a process. I set out working on it a couple of weeks ago. I started by blocking in the dark areas in burnt umber, and just kept building up the paint from there. For most of the painting, I was documenting my progress as I went along (see photos below if you're interested--I was getting a little tired of it by the end so didn't document the last steps). 

In the end, I feel like I may have overworked the image a bit. Honestly, there was a time there when I wanted to scrap the whole thing altogether. I'm glad I kept at it, though, because I think I ended up with a decent painting. As an artist, I have this vision in my head of what I want to create when I start painting, and when it doesn't come out just like I envisioned I beat myself up about it. But I do feel that I learned a lot by just pushing through and finishing this thing, even though I really felt like quitting quite a few times :)

In the future, I'd like to figure out how to make a larger "alla prima" painting look finished from the start--it might help to have more than an hour or two to work on the thing at a time. It seems like I never quite have time to get to the details before being drawn away from my work ;)