Regrets but Moving Forward

Over Christmas we spent three days in Moab. Glorious. Arches National Park is one of my favorite places in this country (not that I've seen everything I want to see yet). We both had new cameras and set out to capture this beautiful park. We first entered on Christmas day after a fresh snowfall. No one was there, literally. So amazing. I didn't do any sketching or creative journaling when we were there and I regret that now, five months later. I wish I had captured my feelings there and then; now I have to rely on memory.

Both weak. Need to try again.

It would have been so easy to do one of these composition sketches right there, in the car, with the scene directly in front of me. Then pull out my mini travel watercolor set and capture some of the colors and values that were intriguing to me, along with a few words to describe the joy I was feeling. But I didn't. It was cold, it would take time, I just wanted to "be" and not do.

About a month ago, working from one of my photos, I tried to capture with watercolors an amazing sky scene from that trip. That's what put me over the edge. An awful painting. I'm not even going to post a picture. It was so disheartening that I once again gave up watercolor as my medium. I've been dabbling in acrylics since. I know part of the problem with that painting was that I didn't have the values well thought out before starting, so for my next composition, I took a different photo from the series (one with a foreground, mid ground and background) and starting working out the values.

This value/composition/shapes thing isn't easy. I did the first one and decided it didn't read as, well, anything. So I did a second one. Can't say it's any better. And so the next day, frustrated once again, I did nothing. Looking at it now, I see that I haven't decided what the focus of the painting/drawing is. The sky? The rock formation? If I as the artist don't know, how will anyone else? How will a painting come together if I'm not even sure what I want to say? Magic, I guess.

Assignments:
- Redo this value composition with the sky as the focus.
- Redo this value composition with the rock formation as the focus.
- Write in my journal, what is it that I want to say about this scene, about Arches?

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