Monday, September 9, 2013

A hike in September

I was out this weekend hiking Black Mountain with my husband, another family and our dogs.  Black mountain is to the west of Franconia Notch, on the backside of Cannon Mountain.  It's only about 2800' but the Chippewa Trail is fairly steep most of the way.  Packed my smallest paintbox, a couple pens, two brushes and a tiny water dish.

Just a little chilly up on top, with a fair bit of wind.  Clouds were moving in quickly from the west so I sketched as quick as possible.  The air was quite dry which also had me sketching quickly but still had an unfortunate influence over the work...the pigment dried too quickly causing my edges, overall, to be harder than I wanted.  I was hoping for softer edges in more areas.  However, given that I had a very limited palette to work from, I am quite pleased with the variety of late summer greens on the page.  So, in the end, I'm delighted with the result.

There's more to the painting than shown here.  My scanner isn't big enough to get the entire image so I chose the composition that was most interesting to me.  There were pine trees off to the left.  I might go back in and add them, as well as a little more variation on the middle mountain, the Cannonballs.

Off to the next adventure!