Santa Rosa Plateau.

This is what i ended up after my hour 1/2 hike in the Santa Rosa Plateau. I'll probably retouch the branches a bit and clean the color of the tree. I tried to be as accurate with color as possible which somehow tends to dim colors and muddy them a bit. I think accuracy should not be the goal in the final result but it helps to have the tonal scale correct. These kinds of landscapes are much less forgiving than urban scenes in that sense.

So that was a long trip to paint. This other pices is what I see right across from my house. I made the neighbor move one of his cars because I wanted the blue VW . I hope he didn't mind ;)

Thoughts on location

I did two hikes recently. One, with Armando, to the waterfalls at Eaton Canyon. Another one today to the Vernal Pools in the Santa Rosa Plateau. The watercolor sketches here are the result of 10/15 minutes of taking a break from walking.


I really went to the Santa Rosa Plateau in search of wildflowers to paint. And there were so many. But not in patches of color. So I looked around for other subjects and the place was so beautiful that I ended up walking for about an hour and a half with my backpack trying to take it all in. I will soon post the result of that trip but here are my sketches for now.