This is my first plein air painting. I painted the background watercolor part at the park, using my new easel, then finished it at home. It’s also the first time I tried painting on a watercolor board.
After receiving some helpful critiques from fellow Art Guild members, I added some things that help to finish the painting.
It was a nice day out with my husband, finished with ice cream at Route 66 Creamery in Hamel.
I referred to this hymn in Yahweh Shalom. After deciding I would try illustrating a hymn, I chose this one. The ocean treatment is new to me, and I haven’t painted many people yet. I was happy to find a photo of Horatio Spafford, and he was leaning on something which I turned into a ship rail.
Two years after the great Chicago fire in 1871, Horatio Spafford wrote this hymn as he passed the spot where his four daughters perished when the ship they and their mother were traveling on, sank. He was on his way to his wife. They had two more daughters and a son after this event. They lost their only son as a child.
While Horatio Spafford’s theology goes astray later in his life (for one reason or another), evidently he was trusting God with his circumstances at this time and wrote this beautiful hymn.
I was on our deck looking for the subject of my next painting. I looked up and thought the trees made a nice frame for the sky, so decided that would be it, and here it is! And recently I got metallic, shimmery watercolor paint so used that in this painting. You can see light reflecting off of some of the leaves.
I was painting flowers for practice and had so much fun painting the clover, I decided to make a painting of it. Bees seemed a natural fit.
I started this painting two or three times with just trees, but it needed something more. So I tried another painting and added a squirrel. It is a more interesting painting, but the squirrel isn’t in the thought.