Killing the Plein Air Mood
It was a beautiful sunny morning after a couple of cooler days. It was also my last opportunity to gather some plein air images for printing. What type of landscape I wanted to capture, I wasn’t sure, but I was confident I’d know it when I saw it.
Perhaps a receding fenceline?
Or a grassy field backed by the forest: 
Maybe a bending path: 
Or a little creek 
There’s a tree with some character worth capturing: 
Maybe some wild flowers? 
A path through the shaded woods? 
Ah finally, this is it: 
A colorful edge of a field with some attractive curving lines. I walked up and down the bit of trail overlooking this scene. There was no great place to sit so I chose a spot in the grass at the side of the trail. I got out my watercolor paint sticks and yupo sheet and sat down. But, 
What’s that … an ant? No not AN ant, hundreds of them. The ground was swarming with them. They were soon all over the supplies that I had set down on the ground and before I knew it they were also crawling over me! I picked up my stuff and frantically started brushing off the ants as I got the heck out of there. My initial thought was to move along and find a nearby place to try again – but I was spooked! I ended up deciding to just collect some photos for future reference and head back to the (safety and comfort of the) studio.
Photo Abstractions (July 2015)
I’ve been playing around with the Tiny Planets app on my smartphone again and have a few intriguing abstract images to share:
Which came from:
And this:
which started from this photo:
And this image which came from applying a second transformation to the first image in this post:
Randall Talbot - Artist 