Estes Park Plein-Air Paintout 2008

The letter came and I made it into the Estes Park Plein-Air Event this August. This was so much fun last year, and such a challenge for me. The subject matter could not be more different, the greens are crazy bright, skys cool blues, everything is vivid. A good reason to apply to shows in places far from home is to get out of your comfort zone, both in climate, people, colors and scenes. You have to really look at the values and colors, not make fast assumptions. You often see painters who painted a scene on a tropical beach with their favorite palette. Not the colors they see but what they are used to using. That is why there are so many terrible desert paintings, often done by artists still using their west coast colors - not really looking at the desert plants but assuming too much about what they think they see. Both the Frank Bette Event and Estes Park will be a stretch. The first couple of days are usually very frustrating, without much success. Lots of scraping. Once that is out of my system, I paint for me. Then it works. Hopefully this year I will only have to scrape off one day, we will see. I plan to post my paintings that are keepers on my website and blog during my trips. I hope that you might learn from what I learned, the good, bad and the ugly. Let's hope for more good! The Paint-out starts on Aug.9th with the Quick Draw & Receptions on Saturday, Aug. 23.