Los Carneros, Goleta, CA

I painted today with PACC, Plein-Air Artist of the Central Coast, at Los Carneros which is the home of the famous Stowe House in Goleta. This is a cool area to paint and one I've painted before at a few years back. Great views of the Santa Ynez mountain range,, wild grasses, trails, a lake, eucalyptus trees, palms...it's got a lot to offer an artist.

The weather was warm and after taking pictures of the group of artists we split up to do our painting. I headed for a big eucalyptus tree for some shade and setup. I had a mechanical problem with my tripod and didn't feel like heading back to the truck for some toold to fix it so I just adjusted things to work and got to painting. Despite the wonky tripod things went ok and in about 2 hours I had a good enough painting to bring home. I like the background mountains and tried painting the trees a bit differently than usual which was fun. I like how they came out but tweaking will make them better. The foreground grasses are there but they too need tweaking. I was going to add a trail but between visits with hikers I was running out of time. I used to want to make a complete, finished painting each time I went out but now have found going back into it the next day makes for better results. This is just because the paint gets really tacky the next day thanks to the copal medium I use and the grasses are always better finished on tacky paint.

There are certain parts of this painting that would make a great larger painting so using it as a sketch is another option down the line. Some of my paintings have come from small parts of other paintings. In fact, I was painting a small 6x8 painting a while back and ended up using just part of it as the inspiration to paint an 8x10. That 8x10 ended up being picked to be used for the invitation cards for one of the California Art Club shows I was in last summer. I still have the smaller painting and each time I look at it I think of how far that quick little painting went. Tomorrow I'll finish this one up.