Spring Park Gazebo plein air

I had such fun at my pastel plein air outing yesterday. But as the morning wore on it began to cloud up, and as noontime approached there were even a few drops of rain being felt. Not very good for painting! But there was a nice large gazebo in the middle of the park so we all gathered up our pastels and chairs and easels and boards and lunches, and came into the gazebo to eat then continue painting.

I had done pretty much all I thought I might with my first painting, so I decided to start a second one, and trying to incorporate the gazebo itself seemed like a fun idea. Though the light was so dark in the gazebo that it was hard to see what I was actually doing. And it's hard to attempt architectural details when you have no rulers or straight-edges and it's all done freehand. But it was still fun to try, and fun to be with a bunch of other artists.

This one, just like yesterday's, was done on my usual 9x12 art spectrum, various pastels.

Spring Park plein air

I don't do much plein air painting. It's usually too hot or too cold or too buggy or too "something" for me. But today we had our first planned outing of the newly-formed First Coast Pastel Society. I have to give lots of thanks to Lyn Asselta for getting this group off the ground, and for organizing this plein air paint out. We had about 7-8 people participate. We met at Spring Park in Green Cove Springs, just an easy 10-15 minutes from my own house, though some folks traveled over an hour to get there. But it was lots of fun! The morning was sunny and lovely, but as the day went on it clouded up, got chilly, and then started to rain. We all ended up inside a large gazebo, and then the rain started blowing in sideways with the wind! It was almost 2:30 PM by then so we called it a day. But I managed to get this painting done in the morning while the sun was still out.