I had a great time in Lake Tahoe last week.  I painted a couple plein air, but they need some adjustment in the studio before I consider finished.  This is a studio painting of the north/east shore, on the Nevada side. The friends we stay with their have a speed boat, so we were able to visit lots of little coves accessible by water.

This was painted 100% by palette knife. I wished I’d taken interim photos, because I think it would have made a good demo. The painting is basically 4 bands of color, so I started it much like I would a Hensche still life, like this one.  That is, large bands of solid color, with white in between.  I keep the white there only because I don’t want edges to touch until I’ve worked out the basic color relationships for each block of color.  With the four bands of color down, I continued to adjust the color of each band.  When I got them right, I brought the edges of the color bands together, then started to model the objects within each band.  For example, the rocks started as a medium value rock color. I then added shadow sides of the rocks (first scraping that area a bit to avoid creating muddy color), then mid-tones, light sides, color variation (warm/cool) within each rock and finally darkest darks.  The same approach was used for the trees and water.  The sky stayed relatively solid, although I did add some flecks of lighter blue/green at the horizon of the sky.

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I’m in the North Tahoe Plein Air show next month, and a hotel and restaraunt in the area is interesting in buying some of my Truckee River work, so looks like I’ll be painting Tahoe scenes a few weeks now.