The Arrival of Spring

Spring Robin  5x7 oil on Masonite

A sure sign that spring is here. I have been seeing flocks of robins around now.

On a different note my wife and I went to the park after dinner to enjoy the sunset, while we were scouting around we saw some deer crossing the road up ahead of us. One of them was a piebald deer, it was brown on the front half and white on the rear half. By the time I could swing around the deer were on the other side of the field. I couldn't get a good picture of it broadside cause it kept its head down feeding.

The sunset was nice too.

Plein Air sketches, oh deer what a morning.

I got an early start Saturday morning, when I pulled into the park I was greeted with thick fog from the lake. I slowly drove around looking for deer and when I saw the first sign of color in the sky I went to the small parking spot over looking the lake.

I like this time of morning when you can just barely start making out the colors in the landscape and the sky goes thru its quickly changing light show. I did this sketch as the intense color started, by the time I finished the sky had changed completely.
As I was putting things away to move to the next spot I turned around and saw a herd of deer had gathered in the field  behind me. That explains the dog barking earlier.

I moved around to the back of the park where last week I saw this field starting to get a nice yellow color to it.

As I was setting up these two does decided to investigate why this person was in the corner of their field.

This is the 5x7 field sketch done that morning.

11x14 studio painting done with acrylics

My interest was the field in the middle distance so I darkened the foreground shapes and added more of a golden color to the field to help make a more dramatic picture.