2015------been out panting a little

Now its the end of March 2015, and thats just amazing to me.  Time flies, no matter what.  Not much of a winter for the west this year, even in our area just below Lake Tahoe on the Sierra Crest.  We really need the water, and this year will be a trial. But have been painting---practicing with Oils, a medium I hardly use.  I have learned to enjoy pastels so much for Plein Air painting, while I know Oils are supposedly easier.  In so many ways they are, but there are some area's they take a bit more care or supplies to make things easier.  Like wet panel carriers, or a good turps container, but all in all , things can be down sized easily for taking out in the field.  Just all a learning curve, and I finally got a great pochade box and tri-pod - - -both by Sienna Plein Air.   I do think these things are nice and easy to use.
So . . . . ..  here are 3 recent efforts.  The first one is done indoors from a notan in one of my sketch books - -done to get into things.

This one is a bit bright---learning to mix from my chosen palette of a split-primary set of paints. Ater this I went out one late PM, and tried using pastels to get the light and shadow patterns as the sun went down behind the mountain on the home ranch. I managed to get this , in pastels.

  and so wanted to try it with oils.  The sun is in the south , the end of February - -and you can see, no snow - -its so odd for us as we are normally pretty buried with it in Feb.!

  Again I see I got my mixes quite bright - -even tho I know the cammera does push the blues . This was oils, a few weeks later in the same place. I painted fast as I was interrupted  quite a bit. So odd as I don't really see to many folks normally! This was mostly done on site, with some added after much thinking later.  I will do this again on site and hope for better results.

  This last one was done mid-morning in Hope Valley---again just for me to learn to mix from my palette a bit faster and hopefully more accurately.  I see many errors, but will continue in order to learn - - -  -but I do like my pastels at this point better!!!   So all for now - -hope  you are all happily painting.