DAY 24 - Painting 3- Paintings in 30 Days (Mustangs)

"Litchfield Homies"

9" x 12"

oil on canvasboard

This is the 9 x 12, I was going to try yesterday.

Glad I waited a day, because I knew yesterday

I didn't have the time.

I love the colors...I planned carefully on that one.

I knew I needed to mix a lot of pigment to get those

different brown and red tones.

These two wild stallions in the painting,  came over to me

this past spring while we 

were visiting the BLM Wild Horse Facility 

near Litchfield, CA.  

They were the only two of the 3 to 4

who were inquisitive

enough (or maybe just more on the 'tamer side') to come closer

to see what I was doing.

I knew right then that they would be painted within the year.

LOVE IT!

Mare and Colt Oil Painting

"Staying Close"

9" x 12"

Oil on Raymar canvasboard

It's been almost 2 months since I posted any art.  It has been a whirlwind two months.  I feel reconnected again with my surroundings and am back at the easel...paining (and painting) away my frustrations of being away too long.  Yes, it takes awhile to get back into it, but as I sat these last few days, I reviewed (straight from my notebook I keep) those little quips about - what to do when it's not working...it's kind of like plugging back in and readjusting.  There are things that usually work when I am in a rut at the easel.  One big one is over-relying on my 'value scale'.  This photo was so dark where the mare was concerned - that later afternoon direct sunlight on the backside of them...I wanted to come up a value and show more color to make it more interesting.  The value scale helped me bump it up one notch into the light and not lose the effectiveness.  I could have done it with Photoshop, but I had already made a copy of the photo to work from and took the challenge. Done from my own photo of the wild horses on "Wild Horse Mesa" near San Luis, Colorado.

This painting is for sale at my Etsy store.

From the Road

Checkin' it out at the gas pumps at Bob's...

"Co-pilot to pilot - did you see that?"

"Is this the way we wanted to go? Did I take the right turn?"

Scenes from our trip...so far...

Highway 10 between La Junta and Walsenburg...love the skies!

Free coats and clothes - wait a minute...oh darn, they're closed.

Tricky shooting from a moving motorhome. I think this is called "Buck Mountain" off of Highway 160 between Walsenburg and Fort Garland. 

This is a shot, raising the lens up over the screen in the side window and taking a "Guatemala" shot - that's what I call it shooting blind, as I did in the markets in Guatemala - in other words without using the viewer through the lens.   A little shakey, but not bad.

We looked at land on top of the mesas (we are always looking at a place to be 'hermits'), near the Rio Grande River/San Luis valley.

Note to self...antelope do not hang around for the papparazzi.  If you look real close at the dead center of the photo, you will see their little bodies, hustling across the sagebrush.

There were "open range" horses - I assumed they were wild..

We got awfully close.

Ooops...seems to be a little mix-up in the gene pool...

Wait!  Who is that behind that tail swish?  Oh - wow - the star of the show!!

Always well protected within the circle of adults...

"Hey you guys, they just might have some kind of treats for us!"

That's what makes me wonder...tame on the open range?  or wild??  Couldn't see any branding marks...and this place is called "Wild Horse Mesa" - we think - anyway we were looking for that place.  Maybe we had found it.   There isn't a lot of signage in these parts.

Shrine of the Stations of the Cross above San Luis, Colorado - gold spikes on the tops of those domes and towers.

Back to civilization...ominous looking clouds over the Sangre de Cristos near San Luis.  That's all for today...