Today, I went on a plein air paintout with a couple of local artists. I chose a location fairly close to home, where Highway 66 crosses the Mojave River. Beautiful place with a lot of different subject matter. I spent most of my time painting the view below, though the resulting painting is "unblogably bad." I don't have much plein air experience (at least, compared to my in-studio experience) and still get easily distracted and overwhelmed with visual information when I paint outdoors. However, I keep trying and I'm sure I will be making blogable plein air paintings more often :)

Another view I painted was of a couple of Yuccas. If you don't live in the desert, chances are, you don't know what those are. I didn't. These are also called Spanish Dagger, which adds a touch of drama...The painting below is not completely finished (I added light background wash at home but didn't take a picture of it yet). I spent maybe 15-20 minutes on it and was a lot happier with it than my first painting, which took 1.5-2 hours.

....And I also dropped my pastels and, when I was about to pick them up, I noticed that they looked all nice and colorful, randomly arranged on top of the gravel, almost like an idea for an abstract, and I had to take a picture. So there you go :)