Trip Planning, Tuscany Here I Come

Preparing Plein Air Travel Kit

This week had been filled with exploring around Tuscany on Google maps for locations to stay before and after the Plein Air workshop I plan to take in May. How exciting is that?
I did manage to do a couple of small paintings at the end of this week and continued on with the fifteen minute sketches every morning. 
The mornings have been very beautiful with sailors warners of bad weather to come. One day the sun was shining under the clouds and through and I missed getting a good photo of this amazing sky because it changed so quickly by the time I got my big girl camera it had changed substantially. I've seen similar morning sky images painted by The Group of Seven and will try and capture something like what I saw. I'm working on trying to develop my memory. But getting out earlier to capture these would be ideal. Even just to do a small study.
The way the sun was hitting the far shore was also very unique, usually the sun hits the mountain tops first and as it rises grows more down the mountain. However, on Thursday it glinted under the clouds and seemed to grow from the waters edge upwards but that must have been the clouds movement. Again I was unable to capture this view as it happen so quickly and by the time I got my camera it was already fading.

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Both these paintings I've used a limited palette of colours as I am going to travel with a fewer number of hues then is usually on my palette. This is a warm/cool primary palette which means it has each of the primary colours with a warm and cool version. I found it to be a little challenging as I usually have twice as many tube colours on my palette and I'll need more practice again at finding my mixtures as a full palette is much easier to arrive at a colour I'm hoping for. Not to say mixing on my palette is what I want to be doing, ideally I'll be mixing on the canvas wet into wet. 
This studio I'm working in is large and full of natural light and although I was working inside on these paintings and from my computer screen for a specific image I am surrounded by the hues of the rain forest. 

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