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Many times for my classes I will do a demo painting.

"Canyon Noon shadows" is one that I did for a pastel class, of a place with which i am very familiar. In fact , it is a favorite place to plein air paint. Sometimes, I'm even part of the pink jeep tours, as I can hear the driver pointing out " ...and here is one of our Sedona artists out painting", as they go whizzing by. Fortunately this does not happen too regularly, and it is a spectacular, peaceful place to paint.

The paper I chose, Canson mi-teintes, is one that I have been using for  a very long time, and I use the smooth side. You can actually see the paper color at the bottom left. It has a " soft hand", in that I can easily get nice soft effects with this paper. One does, however be fairly sure of the strokes, as it will not take much rubbing, or re-working, at all. It is another reason that I like it, in that it forces one to be sure about the strokes. Since I am so familiar with this location, and just how things should look, I was confident in my rendering.

This painting is really about massed shadow and light areas, as they are very distinct in this piece. Notice that even though there is a lot of value contrast between the cliff lower vegetation and cast shadows with the brightly lit foreground, the attention really is focused on the warm and cool colors of the cliff itself. Here is where I placed the richest, warm colors, and the heaviest strokes. I kept the shapes very simple , and certainly wanted the feeling of the large looming cliff, so I did not render most of the cracks, fissures, and color changes of different rock layers.

The brilliant blue sky is very much a part of this piece as well, so I made sure to use some of the same coloring amongst the vegetation, cast shadows, and the upper rock surfaces in shadow, so that the sky is not an isolated blue shape . Out there, the azure skies do influence much of the other colors. 

Even though I have painted this vista many times, I still have lots of pictoral possibilities to explore, and I'll keep going back there!