Along the Santa Ana River

I got a late start so I stayed close to home.  The shapes and values of the clouds were really attractive to me.  I picked a spot that would give me a full view of the clouds.

Since I have been painting plein air with oils, I have had to adjust to a limited pallet.  A lot of plein air painters would laugh at what I am calling a limited pallet.  There are some painters who paint with as few colors as 3 or 4.  When I am painting inside I have a pallet of up to 100 colors or more.  I do not really subscribe to the idea of achieving more with less.  I want to achieve more color diversity through the breadth of what is available to me.

The clouds were moving fast so I captured their general shape quickly.  One of the things that I have been working on is to spend less time drawing my composition.  Here there was zero drawing.  

The exposed board in the clouds represents the lightest values of the clouds.  I established the value of the foreground, middleground, and background.

The clouds were my initial focus and their development dominated my time for the first half of the painting.

The clouds slipped by and disappeared.  I had to remember the impression they made on me.  This is more a test of memory than anything else.

One of the things I have been thinking about and trying to introduce in my painting is the fullness of the perspective of the sky.  The feeling you get when you see these massive cloud shapes above you and their movement off into the distance.  

I finally moved away from the clouds to work on the hills and the orange grove.

Here I am working the values throughout the painting and working to insure that all the parts of the painting are relating to each other properly.

The darkest values within the orange grove are added to make sure I am pushing back the hills and the clouds.

The sun was setting as you can see by the length of the shadows.  The painting was fast and furious.  One of the things I have been working on is leaving it all out on the board.  I have been squeezing out a lot of paint.  Not all of it has ended up on the painting.  I am trying to judge the amount of paint I am squeezing out to conserve.

The cloud values need to be softened and the aerial perspective should have created greater depth.

Time to pack up.

The finished painting "Clouds Over the Santa Ana River"  plein air oil on board 24"x 32"

The value shot lets you see if I saw it and put it down right.

The detail shot lets you take a better look at the brushwork.