Again, the focus of the day was the painting workshop. More about that in a minute. But Key and I did take a little birding expedition after the workshop and before dinner, so I have a few photos to show.

There was also a reservoir with an abundance of waterfowl, but there was no way to get close enough (at least not without hiking in INSANE heat) to identify them.

I added yesterday’s paintings to the Day 9 post, if you want to check out yesterday’s paintings.

Today, my goal was to focus on tack. This is a bug-a-boo of mine, and Peggy Judy does lovely tack. As usual, I got sidetracked. Also, I struggled with the medium. I’m having trouble putting the right amount of paint on (working in oils) and I had to break to let the paint “stiffen” in order to take the next steps.

I felt like I was doing too many blue backgrounds, so I decided to try this lemon yellow. It’s too much, and I’ll adjust it later. There is also too much paint on, so the tack got completely out of hand.

This is done on a small panel I gessoed in black. The black gesso is very flat, making the oil painting over it show up. The “black” of the magpie is actually Payne’s gray. Isn’t color interesting? The photo has a pretty bad glare on the top.

This was my third painting, and the best attempt of the day. I had to stop before finishing because I was too tired for the detail work necessary to complete the tack.

I sketched this little foal, then put in the background in the last few minutes of class. I was very tired and knew I couldn’t do more.

To be continued…