Playing with my Florida Winter Palette

Tree Paintings

Notes From My Tree Journal

I did this painting today with the same palette as my painting yesterday. I will try to get a better image to share tomorrow. I am really liking this palette. In today's version of pine trees at Fair Oaks, where I am an Artist in Residence, I used a lemon yellow bias in the trees. Yesterday, I used a yellow ochre bias in the tree painting. That is what I love about this palette. You can push the palette more to the earth color or more to the cool greens, depending on how much lemon or ochre you mix into the greens. Using blue and black as your green mixers give you a lot of room to move from gray greens, to cool intense greens. This is a terrific palette. I think I'll be able to use it for most of the winter this year. One of the things I like about the last couple of painting with this is using the cool gray sky rather than the usual blue.  I have a thing about using odd colors in my skies. I don't mean the ubiquitous pink clouds that so many Florida painters use, I mean the entire sky. I have painted brown skies, yellow, blue, lavender, gray, pink and orange skies as well as red.

Go big or go home!!