Jack’s Branch in the Spring

Jack’s Branch in Spring, © Sydney Harper
Acrylic on painting board, 5 x 7 inches

This is the perfect time of year to drag out some old photos to paint. Throughout the year, I’ll print out photos that I would like to use as a reference and stick them in a notebook. It’s a good resource for those days when I don’t know what I want to paint. This painting is from a photo at the Jack’s Branch rest area along the Natchez Trace Parkway. It was spring when I took this photo and everything was bright and green. It’s a perfect resource to work on when everything is dull and gray like it has been lately.

I painted this very quickly. It’s practically a sketch. It was one of those days where I didn’t have a lot of time to paint but I wanted to complete a painting. Since I exceeded my goal of 40 paintings last year, I decided this year’s goal would be 100 paintings. I have a tendency to get caught up in details when I paint, so this will be good practice for relaxing a bit with my paintings. Now if I can just forget I set this goal like I did last year, I might just exceed it too. Like my paintings, if I think about my goals too much, things start to drag.

Gordon House, Natchez Trace

Gordon House

5 x 7 inches, watercolor

I'm still playing around with limited palettes. This is a quick little watercolor of the Gordon House along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. It's not inhabited in real life, although you can go through it during the day. I've been rumaging through my photos of the Natchez Trace lately, looking for likely painting candidates. The Natchez Trace goes by near our house so we end up taking it when we have the chance. I end up stopping along the way to take lots of photos.

This week, well this month actually, has been flying by. I can't believe the month is almost over. It's been a busy month but I've managed to accomplish a lot in spite of it.

Cypress Inn

Cypress Inn, 5 x 7 in, acrylic on illustration board
Sydney Harper

This is a quick little painting of the cross roads at Cypress Inn, Tennessee, just across the Alabama border. It's actually more of a community than a town. In this part of the country, you often see these older buildings right along the road. Often they've been abandoned and overcome with kudzu. This particular building looks like it's being used. I painted this from a photo I took last spring. At the time, it looked in better shape than the previous time I saw it. I've always been curious to know it's history though. It's located close to the Natchez Trace Parkway.

I said it was a quick painting but I tried it several times before I got something I was willing to keep. I started out a few times in watercolor but quickly ditched those efforts and moved to acrylic. I don't often paint buildings so I'm trying to get more practice at it.

Speaking of photos, I came across a good method for organizing your photos in the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Classroom in a Book. I take a lot of photos for reference and other purposes. Finding them again can be a challenge though. Jay Graham proposes making a folder by date and subject and then numbering your photos by date inside the folder. For example photos of Yellowstone on June 20, 2008 would be in a folder called 20080620_Yellowstone. The photos inside would be named something like 2008_06_20_01 with the last number being the number of the photo. I do something similar. I make folders by subject with folders inside that by date. I may try to reverse that one of these days.

Finally thanks to Michael Nobbs' tweet, I found a copy of Harold Speed's The Science and Practice of Drawing on the Project Gutenberg web site. I did a little search and also found Walter Crane's Line and Form. The last book is focused mostly on decorative arts but there's still a lot of good information in it.