This past week I was able to take my painting supplies up to Maryland. My mom, sister, and I spent four days in Ocean City, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to paint in a different location. I only had a few goals: I wanted to work on at least one new painting a day and cover the entire canvas. Anything that I felt wasn’t finished, I would bring back to touch up at home. I wanted to get at least a base layer or generalized layout done to work on later.

I never traveled anywhere to paint before, but I knew it would be best to pack light. I already had a steady travel easel that I was using at home, so I only needed to buy a few different supplies. I got packs of canvas panels that would take up less room than stretched canvas and an airtight container to carry my palette in. I scheduled  myself a time each day to work on a painting during different times of day. Some of them I spent an hour on before I had to stop because of lighting, or I had to let the paint dry before I could continue. Others I spent a long time on before I was remotely happy with them. A major challenge for me was trying to keep the sand out of my paint. It got windy the first day and sand kept blowing onto my canvas! Overall, it was a great experience. I was able to get out of my basement studio and met all of the goals I set for myself. I even got some feedback from some people walking by.  

Here are a few of the paintings I made. For the dark one, I was only focused on blocking in the colors I saw rather than fully rendering the image. In the beach one, I only had an hour to work on it before the lighting began to work against me and I had to stop. I plan to work on both more later on. 

In this one I focused on blocking out the colors only and I will add details later

I was only able to work on this one for an hour before the lighting began to work against me. I plan on adding more layers later

Until next week!

~Jordan