I drove my van to a painting competition in northern michigan

It's too early for bathing. All right, I just got all of my blank panels stamped to verify that they're blank at the top of the day. It is 7 48 and I have until 3 30 to do a bunch of paintings, so I'm gonna aim for two. But my first stop I think is gonna be on this road that you can just barely glimpse Lake Michigan through. It's a rainy day. I prefer sunny days because I like harsh shadows, but all days are beautiful. So let's go. I thought for sure I was gonna want to do this scene. I feel like I can see a little less than I thought. I still think I want to do it, but I think I'm gonna have to change up the composition just a little bit. There's just so many cool layers of things that I love it. So and I think it's a perfect scene for a really rainy day. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. Something I've been focusing on in my paintings lately is really thinking about the scene before I just dive in with paint. So I started off with just looking for a while and having some coffee and thinking about what I wanted to convey. And then I did a few thumbnail sketches to try and work out the composition, which is something that I often struggle with. I also wanted to explain a little bit how plein air competitions work. Essentially you show up at the top of the day and get your panels or your paper stamped to verify that you are painting day of. Then you go out within a set geographic boundary and do a painting or multiple. And you have to have them finished, framed, and ready to hang by the end of the day deadline so that you can be part of award judging and gallery sales later in the day. All competitions are different and some are multiple days, others are just one. This is a single day festival so I'm painting all my paintings today and dropping them off by 3 30 p.m. Painting started off really well and now I feel like I'm hitting a little bit of a wall on it. Oh hi, who are you? Oh you want to go check out my van? Bye. Anyway, I started off really well and now I feel like I'm kind of like hitting a wall. I always, I'm really struggling with this like orchard and how to paint it. So I think I'm gonna go warm up in the van for a sec, kind of think about things, and then I think I might scrape that middle section and then get back at it. So we'll see. So far the rain's held off though which is really nice. Maybe I'll have like a granola bar and just be like, oh everything's fine. I think maybe the problem is is I'm like trying to make the like little orchard of trees the focal point when actually I think maybe the focal point is pyramid point. Hmm I think that's it. And so I'm gonna go back out and I'm gonna like scrape off some of that orchard and knock it down a bit. That definitely was the right move but now the lighting is so different and I think I like reworked it too much and I think my style does best when I leave like a bit of exposed canvas. It's only like 10 30. Yeah it's 10 30. I have five hours. I think I might pack up give this one a little bit of a rest and then maybe come back to it but I think maybe I need like a little bit of a mental break. All right I decided I'm going to use this as a reference and obviously the scene and I'm gonna redo it. I'm gonna focus on maintaining bits of the panel and more looseness and like less thick paint. I want it to be more scratchy. Let's go. I'm gonna do this road. All right I have two hours left to paint and I'm actually almost done with my second painting which means I'll have time to go back and revisit my first one but I'm loving this one so much more. I feel like it was a really bad one this morning. So yeah I really I love painting roads so. So I'm gonna finish up the trees, clean up the road, and then I'm gonna turn this bad boy in. This is what she currently looks like. Cutie. I definitely forgot to put deodorant on today. That's good. I'm gonna be in my YouTube video. That's my mom. All right these paintings are due in like 45 minutes and I still gotta fix this one because it's still I don't really like it yet. I will though. For that I'm gonna frame them just so I know I can work up like right to the last minute and also I think it'll be helpful to kind of see this one with its frame. Maybe that will like inform what I need to do to it. But it actually probably would be really helpful for me to do more studies before painting. Paintings are officially dropped off. I think I saved that other one but we'll see. I definitely just like the red one better but that's okay. Will as well. All right headed into the gallery opening. So hopefully one will both sell but probably likely that they won't and that's okay. We'll see. And that is a wrap on the competition. I was so excited to sell both of my paintings and get an award and also so many of my aunts and uncles happened to be up there that weekend so it was really awesome to have them there too. And now I finally get a chance to relax and watch the sunset take a little bit of a breather but of course I also did a few extra paintings just for fun while I'm up there too. All right I just got home from Leland Planair and it was the absolute best experience. I love the old art building in Leland. This town in particular is right down the road from my grandma's and so I grew up going there all the time. This like county is actually where like my great-grandparents are from so it's a really special place to me and I absolutely love it up there. So getting to paint in a place that I know like the back of my hand is a really special thing and also the people who run the old art building are just like the best. Yeah and I'm really proud of myself for winning an award on a painting that I really struggled with. That was like so cool. I think I'm proud of myself for really going through the process of problem solving on a painting that I was just really having a hard time finding its lane. And then the second one that I did which just like I love painting red. I love painting yellow. Sunlight I that one was like right up my alley. So I'm happy that I challenged myself with one and then did another one that really felt right up right up my alley. And my patrons are actually getting uh for the month of May that road painting. If you don't know I have a mail club where I send my patrons a plein air painting I did that month every month with the exact coordinates of where it was painted and a note about it. It's just a really cool way to document the changes of the seasons together and um just like kind of a good reminder to keep your eyes up and looking at the world around you. So if you want to join that that's going to be linked in the description. And other than that I leave for another plein air competition in like two days. Yeah so I bought the van like right before I did this competition. So I have not been able to do any conversions on it yet. So yeah I think that's it. Thank you so much for being here. I love having you here. I've been really really loving sharing more long-form and in-depth and meaningful content with you on YouTube. And the last video was really fun and I hope you really like this video too. Coming up we're going to have more pottery content, more painting content, and we're going to get a little bit of van videos. I'm not going to show you how to convert van because I don't know how but we're going to learn together and you're going to watch me struggle which I think will be fun hopefully for you. Anyway if you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can leave them below. I will do my best to answer all of them. If you could like it and share it that would be awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so grateful for all of you. Okay hope you have a good day. Bye!