Frosty Morning - 30 in January 2014

                                           Acrylic Palette Knife, "Plein Air" from window

This is the view I saw when I woke up this a.m.   I just love when the mountains are pink!  I scrambled to set up to paint, because this is the kind of lighting that doesn't wait for you to gather your supplies.  I used a palette knife and worked as fast as I could. 

I had to wait till this evening to post, because with that much paint, it took all day to be dry enough for me to feel comfortable putting the painting on my scanner.  I did the best I could in editing with Photoshop Elements (PSE) and hope I am giving you a viewing experience that fairly represents the painting.  I honestly don't know anymore.  I have been messing around with PSE for about half an hour now, which is not really how I want to be spending my time.  I am dog tired, too.

I worked for a long time on another palette knife painting that is just never going to work out.  I eventually had to play bartender (paint-tender?) to myself, "Meredith, I'm cutting you off, you've had enough paint for one day."  Do you guys ever have to do that with yourself?  I was finding myself bargaining, "Oh, just a little more yellow, I know I can get this right, how about just that little bit that is sort of already coming out of the paint tube that I didn't remember to cover, just that little bit?"

Does anybody else here know that conversation?  In my defense, I do often have the proper artist conversation going on in my mind:  "does that color need to be warmer or cooler?  darker or lighter?"  You know, the conversation the books tell you to have.   But occasionally, I need to become the paint-tender...

Thank you all for your responses to my questions from yesterday.  It was heartwarming to me to read your responses and see how much we all have in common...except for one artist I met yesterday who is THREE paintings ahead!! (see yesterday's comments)

Which reminds me of one more thing.  I'm not sure how to break this to you guys, so I'm just going to go ahead and say it.  Marc Hanson has announced he's going to do 112 paintings in February.  That's four paintings per day, Watchers!  Don't we all feel like slackers now?  You can read his blog post here.  I'm definitely going to be watching him.   By the way, I really don't want anyone reading this to feel badly.  Try to remember he's got experience upon experience... 

Have a good day painting tomorrow, everyone.  I'll be working for ten hours.  I think I could use some encouragement to come home and paint!

Almost forgot the soapbox.  Remember, you will want to skip the rest of this post if you have been here in the last few days:

One of the the very best things I have ever done for my blog readers was to figure out how to get rid of that "prove you're not a robot" thingy for when readers want to leave a comment.  I would encourage all bloggers to do the same.  The tests to see if someone is a robot are getting smaller and blurrier and harder to pass.  I did find the other day that if you fail about three times in a row, they throw one at you with larger, clearer print.  Yes, you have to REALLY want to leave a comment on someone else's blog to try to prove you're not a robot four times!
 
Bloggers, you can still have good control over the comments on your blog if you enable moderation.  That way, all comments go to your email and you have to approve them prior to their posting on your blog.  So, you use your own brain to decide if someone is a robot or not.  Actually, Blogger does a good job of catching most of the spam comments and not even sending them to your email.
 
Of course, we all have a choice how to handle comments on our own blogs....but I know the feedback I've had from my followers about not having to prove themselves not robots is..."what a relief!" 

Feel free to email me for instructions on how to make this change to your own blog, and Happy Painting!