Beaver Pond, Compositions and a Trip to the Museum

To see my paintings visit my website www.janblencowe.com

 I've been documenting the activity in our beaver pond, and around the rest of our property. Here you can see the beaver's lodge and the trees they have felled. There are ducks, and swifts. Occasionally I hear a Great Horned Owl, and we have some lovely birch trees too. Pencil and watercolor.

One of the things a sketchbook  is good for is testing out compositions before you commit to a large painting. This is a local scene on our downtown and I admire the weeping cherry tree every spring. Four small, fast paintings let me explore several compositional possibilities. Then I was able to make notes analyzing what I liked and didn't like about each. In the end I went with a version similar to the one in the upper right. Golden Fluid Acrylic.

One of the really nice things about keeping a sketchbook journal is capturing the places you go and the things you see. This page has some figure studies of customers having lunch at Denny's along with my fruit salad! Then a trip to the museum followed where I jotted down the information on Tonalism that accompanied the painting by Emil Carlsen that I did a sketch of. Below that is a sketch of Willard Metcalf's sketchbook that he kept when he was in New Mexico and to the left two Canada Geese who were on the museum grounds enjoying the rain.