Blue Spruce Plein Air

I went back to Brooklyn Botanic Gardens yesterday.
It was nice to be out alone with all the plants.

I love these plants!

Aren't these mugs great?
I got one.

More pictures from familiar places, it was nice to be back.
I didn't really walk around a lot on Sunday, so I did a bit yesterday.

Japanese Garden:

This gorgeous tree caught my eye and I decided to paint it.

Here was my view:  I really loved how the tree stood out against the dark.

The color in this photo is not great- that tree basically glowed blue, it was amazing.

So..... this was a really difficult painting and I kind-of missed the mark on getting the lights on the tree.

Partly because by the time I got to the lights, I had direct sun on the panel at a really bad angle and I stopped being able to see at all.  5pm this time of year is a terrible sun angle!! I did move around but no angles were good.

Also conifers are difficult and I don't really know how to paint them.
I need to figure that out. Probably in-studio.

This painting ended up being a lot darker than I intended... and without the glow I wanted to get.
I should have added cadmium yellow to the palette but I only used yellow ochre, and it was limiting for lighter greens.

But weirdly and unexpectedly, it has gotten extremely positive response on social media. 

I'm kind of surprised to be honest because I didn't think it was that great. 

But people seem to really like all the darkness.

This painting kind of dragged on longer than I wanted to be out, and the sun angle really was a problem.

People at BBG loved it though, and I did get mistaken again for a high schooler so that's cool.

This painting absolutely would not photograph at all.
This is the best I could get, and I had to do it at home.

8x10 oil

On-location shot.... doesn't that look terrible?
I tried taking many location pics at different spots and angles and they all looked awful.