I (almost) finished my painting on Malpais National Monument over the weekend. Here it is!

I still need to clean off the under drawing. That's what the thin white lines are. And the colors in this picture are a little off since I took it at night. But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's my inspiration. It's a scan from my original photograph, but you get the idea.

This is one of the pieces I'm working on now. Barring any process disasters, it will be part of my Parks Project. It's based on a photo I took in El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico. It's the first piece I've done on a full sized door for a while. Excuse the slightly wonky pictures. It's hard to get a good picture of a piece this size when it's laying on the floor.

Here it is right after I poured the paint and added the rock salt.

This is after a couple more pours and a bit of drying time.

And this is where the piece currently stands, dry and re-stretched. Somehow I managed to warp a door, which I've never done before. But it lays nice and flat now.

It's always interesting to see how a piece changes as it dries. The red here mellowed out quite a bit, which I was happy with. The red paint was nowhere near that red when I mixed it. 

I just finished a new piece in my Parks Project series. It's called Sequoia National Forest No. 1. Yes, I went to a park created to celebrate the world's biggest trees, and painted a succulent less than and inch and half across. Typical.

I did a pretty good job taking in progress photos with this one. Usually I don't think to do that until the end.

I've done some pinstriped paintings before and wanted to try it again. The first step was to put down some artist's tape.

Next I mixed up a chromatic black, thinned it down with water, and poured it over the surface. The textured bits shown in the picture is rock salt to give it some mottling.

Here it is after it dried, with the tape still on (left) and without the tape (right). I was surprised by how well the tape blocked out the paint. I thought there would be more bleeding around the edges.

Next, I did another round of staining with a chromatic black. I used more water in the second batch of paint so that the stripes would still show. (I forgot to take a picture after this step).

Then I started painting in the plant. 

Here's the finished piece next to my source image! I think the end product captures the feeling of the moment when I took the picture. I was clambering over the rocks in the Tule River at the time and just happened to look down to see this little flower. It was a quiet pause in the middle of a bunch of activity.