McWay, slightly differently

I've painted McWay falls before.  This time from a slightly different angle.  And this time I set out to have different values in the paintings. Definitely trying to get the closest stuff to have the highest values and the darkest hues.  The water I think is ok, and the isthmus I think is fairly good, but I think I got the tree on the left a little too dark.  It doesn't look like it sits back quite far enough for me.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn't get the tree in the foreground quite dark enough.  hmmm.

For anyone that doesn't know, this is a little cove that sits on the California coast near Big Sur.  Only about a billion pictures have been taken of the place.  I've not actually been there.  Ok, if you followed the above link you will see that my painting doesn't have quite the color the real place has, but that's kind of California today.  We haven't had a good rain all summer and everything, I mean everything is brown.

Well, anyway, there is my little picture.  Hope you all  like it.

McWay Falls

Ok, this is a quick sketch, a trial of sorts, for a picture to be painted later.  I did it on cheap paper, but there are some things I really like about this.  For those of you who have followed my paintings, you know that my paintings have been very tight in the past and have been getting looser and looser recently.  This painting displays some of my best wet in wet to date.  

The parts I really like:  the beach and the trees on the left hand side.  I've been trying to get the whole paper wet with paint at the beginning of the painting, letting all  the colors mix and trying hard not to force the paint to do what I want it to do.  In this painting I let the paint do what it wants to do, and tried to stay hands off.  The way the water dissolves into the sand of the beach, or the beach into the water, whichever way you want to look at it, makes me happy to see.  The layering of the trees also makes me happy.  Ok, I got a little too much saturation of color in the distant trees, but the technique and thinking was right.  I can fix the saturation in the next one.  and in the foreground, it looks as though there are 3 or 4 layers of pine trees.  I tried mixing a few different colors of green so that it didn't look like one giant green blob.  I got at least a few different colors.   and the closest ones, while they were wet, I just threw in a little purple for no particular reason.

I should say at this point that painting on a larger scale seems to be easier. It was fun to just scribble in some lines and see it come out close to what I wanted to see.  And for some reason with a bigger brush, this was easier.

I had to put in some leaves from the gum tree in the foreground.  I think in the finished piece, I'll put in even more leaves.  It really did help to push the rest of the painting back.

I'm not a big fan of how the rocks turned out.  I'll have to work on those.  My intent was just to show some texture, but I think I over did it.

Overall, I'm happy with this and if I get a few things worked out with it, I know that its intended recipient will be ecstatic about it.

Thanks for viewing.