For the month of March, I challenged myself to paint 30 6×8 landscapes using only a limited palette of Utrecht paints. I further limited myself to painting local landscapes from my own references. Going into this, I knew I would be challenged by my inability to paint convincing rocks and the very real struggle to…
Tag: Utah
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 4
Day 22. When I was first starting to paint, I would look up tutorials on how to paint clouds, rocks, flowers, etc. I would watch these highly specific tutorials and do my best to follow them and struggle anyway. Eventually I figured out that learning to paint and learning to paint a flower are one…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 3
Day 15. I’ve officially half way through this challenge. Only 15 paintings left. I’ve unfortunately hit a bit of a wall though. The last two paintings weren’t quite as good as I wanted them to be. They aren’t necessarily bad, but I can do better. With this painting specifically, I finished it but really wasn’t…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 2
Day 8. Painting these large rock faces has been interesting. I think I may even be starting to get the hang of it. If I think of it as more of an abstract and am really messy about mixing my colors with my brush I can get a large variety of color and textures. The…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 1
Day 1 and I’m already struggling. The yellow has been pretty difficult to mix so far. The green created by mixing the yellow and blue was really gross. You can see it only in a tiny part of this painting behind the trees on the right on the distant mountainside. My main way of getting…
Painting Field Trip to Canyonlands
This week I joined my oldest daughter on her class field trip to Canyonlands National Park. The school has a great “art coach” who goes out of his way to make art interesting for the kids and this field trip was entirely devoted to art. It was a 40 minute bus ride to the…
Cottonwoods
Pretty self-explanatory. I love the cottonwoods around here, even if they all seem like they’re dying off. When I was a kid, the cottonwoods were so plentiful that every spring it looked like a snow storm in 90 degree weather when they all dropped their cottony seeds in the space of a week. …
Fisher Towers Hike
I love Fisher Towers. It always makes me think I’m on an alien world. The rocks and dirt is super red, and the rock formations are very peculiar shaped. This time of the year, it’s even more dramatic because the plants are the bright green of spring and wild flowers are blooming everywhere. It’…
Signs of Spring
Moab is funny. You can tell it’s spring, not just by the budding plants, but by the arrival of excessive numbers of off-road vehicles and the large truck/trailer combos that haul them in, packs of road-hogging cyclists, and marathon runners. Cue the road rage. I don’t usually participate as a spectator in Easter Jeep…
Abandoned Mines
A couple of weeks ago me and my husband explored a mining area. Since the old road is invisible from the main road, we hadn’t ever thought to hike in this area before. We saw it from high up across the valley as a road, figured there were mines up there and decided to…
Dinosaur Stomping Ground
The Dinosaur Stomping Ground Trail north of Moab is a nice hike and the destination is really interesting. It’s a huge area of sand stone crisscrossed everywhere with dinosaur footprints. I think most of the tracks were about the size as the one in the photo but there were a few that were larger…