Maine Marsh & Meadow

I spent some time hanging out at this spot in Acadia National Park both last summer and this one. Last summer, I brought paints with me a few mornings and sketched for the hour or so while my daughter went running on a nearby carriage road.  This year, I took some photos, so coming into the studio now I had both the old sketches and photos to work from.  

The sketches had little detail and I had purposely tried to focus on large areas of color, but they seemed, looking at them one year later, like they lacked a sense of deep space.  Some of that can come from details you see up close and the lack of detail as things get further away.  The photos had too much detail in the further away spaces (cameras seeing things so much better and crisper than eyes can), so I had to merge the two in my mind to end up with a painting that had the right sense of space.