Shopping District – Painting of the Week

Desert Landscape Plein Air Festival 

It’s the second year I have entered the California Desert Plein Air Festival. Two studio paintings were juried into the show and 2 plein air originals will be added. Three canvases were prepared for acrylic before going to 3 different locations with artists from all over the country. Shopping District was painted on El Paseo in Palm Desert, California. Afterwards, we were allowed to finish them at our studios. This time, I learned more about painting with Acrylic plein air as the medium dries even faster outdoors.

In the desert, we generally paint at 8am to catch the sunrise and beat the heat. I layered up for the temperature changes, as it was 53 degrees in the morning. The light sparkles at 4pm here and gets dark quickly after that. For North Dakota summers, we paint at 4pm because it’s warmer…and you generally need bug spray. The light is amazing at 4pm either place, but is warmer in color late in the day and cool colored in the morning. Since the earth rotates during the day, the challenge is making sure your sun and shadows portrayed are consistent in your painting. An artist in Ironwood Park, Palm Desert, California, told me she was going back at 4pm to paint in the highlights–she was painting her subject over 2 days. Monet understood this as he painted his hay stack paintings between 1880-1890. Monet paintings are not only different in color and amazingly beautiful; he mixed his own paints and went back to same subject to capture the light at 4 different times of the day.

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