New Years Day Plein Air Painting Revisited

This will be an attempt to show step-by-step the painting I made on New Years Day. I hope it will be informative in spite of it's shortcomings. I'm not a wizard with photography, so there's some inconsistency from one shot to the next. Editing photographs of paintings is another challenge. It seems that no matter how hard I work at editing photos, my best hope is to get the photo to look somewhat similar to the original painting. It never looks exactly the same. Sometimes I just take the photos over again. However, you cannot take in-progress photos over again. Also, the finished photographs of paintings will look different from program to program, and from one computer monitor to another. That being said, here's the pictures:

The first thing I do when beginning an on-location painting is tone the panel with a thinned mix of colors. The tone layer is then painted over without allowing it to dry. Since the tone layer is still wet, it mixes somewhat with the next layers of paint, influencing them. Painting wet paint over wet paint also prevents the thinned tone layer from drying into a weak layer.

Using the same color mix as the tone, the composition develops and the darks begin to be worked out.

In the next photo, the darks are established further, and some color begins to be added.

As more color is added, the painting progresses from dark colors to light colors.

Admittedly, more happened in between the last photo and the next picture than is shown here, but I got caught up in paining and forgot to keep shooting pics. The next picture shows the development of distant clouds, and texture in the trees, brush, and marsh grasses.

The next picture shows further development of all parts of the painting, depending on where I think work is needed. 

A few more touch-ups, and the painting is signed and finally finished! 

The last picture shown was photographed with a different camera than the rest of the pictures in this post. I was unhappy with the quality I got with the old little cheapie Casio camera used for the other pictures, so the finished work was rephotographed with a better camera. I'm still not entirely pleased with the photograph, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to show these in-progress pictures to you. I hope that this series of pictures, along with the brief descriptions accompanying them, will give you some insight into the workings of some of the plein air paintings that come from my pochade boxes or easels. Thanks for Reading!