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 Green River Overlook in Island in the Sky where we set up. Once there we had roughly 4 hours to complete our paintings. We were fortunate enough to enjoy a moderately cloudy day since there isn’t much for shade up there. Figures, I got a sunburn despite clouds and sunscreen.
There were three groups of around 20 kids, each with a different medium. My group was given watercolor. There was a brief demo from a local artist on how to sketch the scene and once we had all sketched, another demo on basic watercolor.
So we sat with out little viewfinders and spent the afternoon sketching and painting. Part of my job as a parent chaperone was to make sure kids were where they were supposed to be. There are some pretty dramatic drop offs directly in front of where we were set up to paint so we had to make sure kids weren’t climbing or running around. Painting kept them occupied until the end when they were sick of sitting still, at which point we busied them with the clean up. I admire teachers willingness to watch so many kids in sketchy situations. My kids are pretty familiar with cliffs, but not all parents take their kids out hiking so the kids might not appreciate the dangers. I found it odd that only a very small handful of people in the whole group had even been to Canyonlands. Especially considering that every single person was a resident of Moab.
This was probably the most involved plein air painting I’ve ever done. We were out there for roughly 4 hours and I came away with probably the best watercolor I’ve done to date. The best part was that I really had a good time. I enjoyed spending time with my daughter while painting, which isn’t something that happens very often. Although I don’t think I can make this a regular thing. She was pretty over it after a couple of hours.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this painting. I think my sky really turned out nicely. A few areas of my drawing got a bit lost in the painting and there are some areas that I would change, but I’m super proud of myself for tackling this view. It certainly isn’t the easiest view I could have chosen, but I was very drawn to the dead tree with the maze in the distance below. I almost lost the painting to the wind once or twice and my brush strokes went wild a few times as the wind jerked the board around, but I guess that is just part of the plein air challenge.