Here's a photo of the commissioned painting called "Mt. Tam," after I spent a couple of days working on it this week. I am at the point where there is A LOT of thick, wet paint all over the canvas. Time to walk away and let it dry for a few days so that the colors can stay clean and bright. The photo does not capture how scary-glary-bright the orange underpaintng is right now. I will be glad when I'm a little bit farther along into this piece, because now it totally hurts my eyes to look at it. (Below is my painting progress from the past two days.)

DAY TWO: I started out this morning with the orange canvas I had under-painted a couple of weeks ago.

I began by painting over my pencil lines with dark paint. (Sorry it's so blurry--the sun was super bright and it made the canvas look like it was glowing. I think it freaked my camera out.)

I then began filling all the shadow areas using a mix of dark blue and brown paint. Normally I paint one area of the canvas until it's basically done, but my pencil sketch is really getting lost on the orange, so I thought I'd give this technique a shot.

Next was the sky. My favorite thing to paint! This painting is going to hang in an office with no windows, so the sky needs to be as blue as can be, as the painting will be my client's "window."

When the sky was finished to my liking, I began to paint the water. I also added some highlights into the path.

DAY TWO: Here's the paint I'm going to use today. I'm starting with the mountains the distance so those should have some purple highlights.

Once I finished the mountains I began to add yellow highlights into the grassy field. I want the fields glowing with warm colors so that it causes you to feel the sun on your back.

The contrasts of the green and orange are hurting my eyes! I've just been adding different colors of grasses now for a while. I know what I want this painting to look like when it's done, but am not l too confident as to how to get there yet. It's been a while since I've done a landscape... how do I do that again? I should probably pray about it (seriously!)