RED BARN IN MEXICO

This is a salmon stream in season called the Little Salmon River. It's 36 miles north of Syracuse in Mexico, New York.  The weather is 90 degrees in the day and 50 degrees at night, in the summer.

I traveled to the East Coast from Maui without my chamois or charcoal.

This is a great how-to tip.
Burn halfway down a wooden match and break off the tip.
It works great as a charcoal stick. The more pressure you add the darker the line. This is a two match drawing :)

Also to make it easier and paint smoother I painted the whole canvas with soft acrylic jar white before using the charcoal match stick.

The painting time for this painting is from 9 AM to 1:00 PM.  It's not quite 100% covered yet. Most all of the paint already applied will be gone over. As it is I'm getting all the patterns filled in.  This painting was drawn with only the match charcoal. No acrylic lines over the charcoal. Usually I line over the charcoal with a wash and wipe the support with a damp cloth when its dry.

This first day was bright and cloudless. The sky is a gradation from blue to cyan.

It was a hazy day with full sunlight, a little breeze, 85 degrees.

I'm changing all the basic colors to 11:00, a hazy day.
While re-doing the sky, I made sure it was lightest next to the dark and darkest next to the light.

Stopped at 1:00, turned right and I'm painting The Little salmon River picture now.

I just went up to the house to wash my hands and was really surprised at how cold the well water was.

Another hazy day, I'm glad I had decided to change colors yesterday.
Today the haze is even more pronounced.
While looking at a white building today to color balance myself I see a cadmium red tint.
All the browns have blue in them.
The aerial perspective factor has increased. The normal one mile away colors are now only 400 yards away because of the haze.

It was too cloudy today so I just made paint density corrections. In places where there was just a wash of color I made them more opaque and as close to the original wash color as I could.

There is still that pink haze, I'm so lucky.
I'll get this one finished tomorrow, I'm more worried about the second picture.

The reeds on the bottom left had to be painted in white, twice, before the green to yellow color was added.

Tomorrow will be the big day. 
At nine o'clock the sun will be coming in from the side. There is enough of the painting already final so I'll be able to jump around like the little rabbit I saw yesterday.  A big mud hen stopped by too, I hope he does tomorrow when I have a brush in my hand.

This tree, the willow, has a peculiar quality. All the small sickle shaped leaves bristle on the branch. When the wind blows the much lighter underside faces up and reflects the sun or the sky. This allows for the leaf to be brighter than the sky when they are next to each other. That is very unusual.

Starts with rain, 9:30 stops.
11:30, I might be finished.
The same white caterpillar has come back to me 3 days now. He climes up my easel and on my palette for me to see him.
I put him back on some weeds and a couple minutes later he's back. One, two, three times already today.
The reflections and the wind ripples are my final strokes.