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I've never seen bananas on my neighbor's trees, but he insists that they're banana trees. Who am I to argue? I just want to paint them.

So I just realized that Maui Plein Air Invitational event is happening in less than two weeks, and I have not done any plein air painting since last fall. This is not good. Painting en plein air is an entirely different game than painting in the studio, and it requires a lot of practice to do it well.  

And the Maui Invitational is not the event one wants to be painting in, if one is not confident in producing good work on the spot. There will be 25 painters I'll be compared against, for one thing. And they are some of the best in the business. I certainly don't want to look a fool next to these seasoned pros. 

And purely from a business stand point, not only do I have to do good paintings, but I have to sell them. Since each participating artist has to pay his or her flight to Maui (expensive) and rent a car for 7 to 10 days (more expensive than the flight!), if our work doesn't sell, we will not have covered our expenses. That is a lot of pressure, to be sure. Maui is paradise, and I'm happy and honored to be invited to this event, but this is not a casual vacation for us participating artists.

So I thought I need to practice a bit. I don't need to drive around to find a beautiful scenery just to practice my chops. I decided to just plop my easel down on my driveway, and paint my neighbor's house. They have these alleged banana trees in the front yard, and I thought hey, that's a little bit of the tropics! And I remembered to take a few pics along the way, so I thought I'd share them on the new Studio Notes here on the FASO platform.

Here's the view. I live in the suburb of Sacramento, and my neighborhood is nothing special. But as I said, this is just practice, and I don't need a pretty view, per se.

I was interested in the light coming through the bright green leaves, which made a nice contrasty focal point against all that drab gray. The cars in the foreground were a little problematic - big and boring and make too loud a statement. If I were doing this for keeps, I may have moved them a bit, or not paint them at all. But painting cars is always a challenge and an excellent practice, so I resolved to do this one pretty literally. 

My canvas is about 9 x 12. I'm using Claessen's No.20, which is a little bit rougher than the No.66. Not a whole lot of difference, though.

I used Asphaltum to block in my design. As you can see, it's very loose and abstract. I like this kind of a start. It keeps me from getting too tight, which often happens when drawing something difficult like cars.

I saw this as a three-value design. And although the shapes are not clearly defined, I was aware of, and indicated, where the darkest darks were going to be. 

I wanted to work out the value relationship between the very bright banana leaves (focal point), the darker roof behind them, and the darkest darks under the eaves. Because I knew the leaves were going to be very bright, I wanted the roof to be dark enough to offer enough contrast. But this roof couldn't be so dark that it couldn't distinguish itself from the darkness beneath. So the very first move was to establish these three values - or to put it more precisely, establish the value relationships. I'm not looking to commit to exact values. I just want to make sure I have the basic structure in place.

To be sure, the green leaves you see in the above image isn't very bright. I wanted to reserve the lightest and the brightest greens for later.

And then I proceeded to work out the drawing of the Suburban. Cars are always difficult to draw, and this one was sitting at a funky angle thanks to the plunging driveway. It took me a while before it started looking OK. 

I did the pale house to the right, at the same time.

Once I had the Suburban in place, I felt I could move on. I blocked in all the other elements - the other car, other plants, the street, etc.

At this point, I thought I'd better establish my focal point and make sure my initial value relationships were working. So I knocked in the bright yellow / green light coming through the leaves. As I had hoped, these lit up leaves showed up nicely against the darker roof.

Notice the thicker application and sharp edges in these strokes to help pop the focal points.

At this stage, I'm continually trying to improve the drawing of the cars, and getting thicker with paint application, especially where it's sunny.

And this is where I stopped. A few details like the bushes and the mail box were added, the drawing tightened up, and some additional edge work - sharpening some areas for impact or interest, and softening or losing other areas to simplify. I increased the contrast in the focal area so that there's no mistaking that the leaves are more important than the cars.

Here's my set up. I'm using Josh Been's  Daytripper easel, which I love. It's lightweight and the design is very well thought out. I've used many different easels, and I'm finding that I like to have my panel at eye level, and my palette lower, like how I set up in the studio. The pochade box that have the panel holder attached to the palette are often super light and compact, but I'm more comfortable with my palette lower. 

There are other systems where the palette is separated and low – the French easel, for one – but most are heavy and bulky. The Daytripper solves this problem by combining lightweight wood with metal supports on the edges. Very clever, and I highly recommend it. 

Check out his website for more info.

And lastly, a shot of the palette at the end of the painting. You can see that I have separate puddles for each color group, and I mix into them to get my variations. My colors are, counterclockwise from lower left. 

Ultramarine

Prussian Blue

Payne's Gray (doesn't look like it in the photo but..)

Titanium White

Cad Lemon

Cad Yellow Deep

Yellow Ochre

Permanent Red

Alizarin

Transparent Earth Red

and I had Asphaltum on the right side, but kinda got a little messy so you can't readily tell in the pic.

That's it. I'm going to do more practice sketches before I get to Maui. 'Hopefully I'll be up to par and knock out some good ones.