"Art Sale" 9x12, oilEarlier this week while exploring, I stopped by Blue Raven Studio at Coyote Gulch Art Village in the center of Kayenta. Blue Raven is hosting my week-long plein air workshop starting April 12th. While visiting, my workshop host invited me to paint Saturday afternoon on the patio with some of the other artists connected with Blue Raven. Coyote Gulch is a complex of studio galleries, and a good bit of traffic comes in to visit the painters, potters and sculptors at work. Blue Raven makes the patio painting session a weekly event to take advantage of the traffic.
I set up with a view of the umbrellas and some of the artwork for sale. I don't often paint this kind of scene - I am here, after all, to paint the landscape! - but since I was working with alkyds, something else I don't do very often, I thought I'd just go for it. I enjoyed the alkyds because they allowed me to lay in a colorful, thin underpainting that dried very quickly. I was able to overpaint this with more "real" color without stirring up the wild color and muddying the paint. A good deal of the underpainting still shows through, making for some very exciting color.
