Morning Meadow; Blue Ridge Mountain landscape painting

I have been spending so much time doing small studies lately that it really felt good to do a big-honkin' painting in the studio of the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains. Ahhhh! Big canvas, big brushes, and lots of paint.

Okay, so this painting is 30x40"--not massive but respectably large for me. I've painted other variations of this scene before but they sold before I could get a high quality photograph taken of them. This snapshot is off somewhat and caught a bit of glare but I will post a better image once I've finished the painting (a bit more minor tweaking to do.) ***Update***This painting has sold, but you can see the finshed painting here.

I decided to try this with a limited palette of five colors (ultramarine blue, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson permanent, cadmium yellow light, pthalo green and white.)

Basically this is the palette Kevin Macpherson often cites in his very good book: Landscape Painting Inside & Out, (which I will write about more extensively in my next post.)

This pallette differs from the one that Kenn Backhaus uses that I had been experimenting with a couple of weeks ago painting on location in Easton Md. I rather find myself gravitating more towards the Macpherson palette, which varies the colors and omits the black. The jury is still out though and I will continue to experiment with both, as I do think I am learning a lot about color.