painting outside every day for an entire week ✶ evanston plein air

All right, today is the first day of Evanston plein air. Usually I bike all the way up to Evanston to do this fest, but today I'm actually going to take my van because I'm going to get a bunch of panels stamped and ready to go for the week. I have them in my bag so that I don't have to stop by the stamping location like a bunch of times throughout the week. I probably will still have to go at least a couple times, but that way I can just throw a couple things in my bag and then head out. This week you're gonna drink a lot of water, eat a lot of food, and look at what's in front of us. If you watched my last video, you know that I have been balancing like a million and one projects and that's awesome and I'm like so happy about that, but it makes it kind of hard to focus a little bit and so I journaled a lot this morning and was just like, you know what, this week is literally only for painting. You're not working on any other projects. That's the plan, Stan. And yeah, I'm painting like Saturday to Saturday. Seven whole days to just paint. Like how lucky am I? I think I just have to remember that all week while I get stressed and tired and sunburned. Panels are stamped, baby. Let's go! This lighting is bad and I need a haircut. It was a fun one to do because I painted that same spot last year, which was like right when I started oil painting, and so it was just like I just looked back on it and it's really fun to see like the difference of my colors and brush strokes and confidence and composition and all of that. I'll put both of those up here now so you can see them too. But yeah, that was a fun one because my friend Amber came to hang out while I was painting, which was lovely. And now I'm going to go to a friend's birthday and then I got to be up early tomorrow. They have two softball games and then it's back to painting. I'm painting every single day this week, which is really exciting. Sue me. I want to finish up this painting, so we're gonna eat. So all done with painting number two. Oh, I love plein air painting. Just walked around and picked that house and it just happened to have the most lovely woman living in it. Her name is Kitty. She's very sweet. She loves to garden and to read. I just love how I never would have spoken to that woman if I hadn't. Just like put my paints on my back and walked around until I found a house that spoke to me. I very rarely will paint just like houses. Like I don't really do that. I usually paint like alleys or like kind of nondescript locations. But I just like saw those pastas. There's some flowers that I had growing up in my house, in front of my house. So yeah, painting day two. I'm so sweaty. I gotta go pick up my friend's pup and dog sitting for the week. See you soon. So all right, today is the first like themed location day mini competition that I'm participating in. It's at Greenwood Beach. I'm gonna figure out what I'm gonna paint. I'm thinking I might challenge myself a little bit today and do objects which I don't typically do. Maybe a lifeguard stand or some boats. Let's see. Oh my god you guys it's so hot I'm gonna die. I think it's like 11 a.m. It's already like 90 something degrees. I'm gonna go back to the van, put my swimsuit on so that I can um paint with my shirt off because damn it's hot. Thanks. I've seen people like you. Yeah there's like um a competition this week. Well if I was rooting for anybody I'd probably root for you. Thank you. I finished my painting three hours early. I wish I would have done a bigger one. I should have but I thought I was gonna get too hot. I thought it was gonna take me too long and honestly I whipped right through that one. So I popped in the water. I went for a swim. Now I'm gonna get changed and I'm gonna go sketch out my big one that I'm gonna do this evening. I'm gonna do an 11x14 this evening. So it's gonna be a dual painting day. It's a beautiful day. It's making me not able to wait for the van to be done so I could just spend my days jumping into water and painting. And I'm frankly shocked that it went by so quickly because kids were talking to me all day They're very funny. All right time to turn her in. So so I was cleaning up to go and I just poured paint thinner all over myself and all over my stuff. Oh it's time to go home don't you think? Look. Emo. What the heck? Day five of painting every day for eight days in Evanston. We're gonna go find an alley I think. I've been wanting to do an alley for a while. So let's go. It's another hot one. I really liked my alley painting for today. I got a lot of really good feedback on it which is awesome. But it's golden hour which means another session on this one. I can feel sweat dripping down everywhere. It's good to work. I didn't get too much done on that one. It's really hot. I'm very tired. I worked for like another an extra hour or so um but I can feel myself getting a headache from being in the heat all day. So I'm gonna go into my air-conditioned van and rest up because we've got another big painting day tomorrow. It's a beautiful day though. A good day of painting. I felt like my alley painting. I was feeling kind of like emotional this morning and I talked to someone on the phone about it and the painting just kind of came out of me which was honestly really nice because I didn't have to think too much about it. Just kind of felt like an intuitive painting which was really good. Another day of painting tomorrow. It's day six. Kind of not in the mood to paint today. I think it's important to push through and um sometimes like really interesting things happen when you make yourself do it when you don't want to. All right I'm gonna get moving. Uh the paint up for today is canceled because the um there's wildfire smoke from Canada so water in the wires. Will's not stressed. He's making fun of me because I'm stressed. I'm gonna have to pick it. Cheers. We got rain last night so my air quality is finally better and it's only 80 degrees and I'm gonna go paint the farmer's market. So I'm a little bit behind with how many paintings I wanted to do this week but I also didn't want to destroy my lungs so compromise. So I literally finished the painting and now it's raining. Perfect timing baby. Um I'm gonna go turn this off. All right it's the morning of the end of the festival and I have to be there at I think 11 11 30 but I got up at six today because I have to head to the wood shop and finish up one last coat of grout on the last couple of frames and I also needed to touch up some of the oil paintings that got a little bit smudged in transit. I should be riding my bike to the wood shop because obviously that's faster but I haven't been able to be outside very much. She says that she painted outside all week but I haven't been able to be outside that much in the last couple days because of the air quality. Um so I'm gonna take a nice little walk to the wood shop. Um I feel actually really good about the paintings that I did this week. I'm really happy with them. I was in a better head space for all of my work this week than I was during Cedarburg. I was also a little sick during Cedarburg. So anyway I'm really happy with most of the paintings. Um actually all of the paintings I think. I'm a little bit bummed because of the wildfire wildfire smoke this week. I have two less paintings than I would have liked to have because um I lost two days of painting. But that's okay. Shit happens. Gotta roll with the punches. You know something that I really value as an artist is conservation of marks. It's a what it means is that you take all the noise out of the scene and you just capture the stuff that helps tell the story. So she's gotten rid of all the signs all the other stuff that you might have included that distract you from telling the story and you just take this nice little trip down this shady alley. Shady meaning in the trees. I was in the trees. Yes you were. And I just think she did a beautiful job at drawing the viewer in with her so. That is a wrap on Evanston plein air. Obviously there were a couple hiccups i.e the smoke. I wish that I could have had the big challenge of painting every single day for eight days. But I'm really proud of the collection that I made. Um a lot of them are here behind me. Some other stuff too. Though I did sell the ones that were in the gallery I have some that are gonna go up when this video goes up. So if you're seeing this right when the video goes up um I'm posting all those paintings on my website today. And I'm also going to be releasing some of them as print editions on my website so you can get them in fine art paper or stretched canvas in a variety of sizes. So that's really exciting. Yeah it was a great fest. I loved it and it made me really really excited for my first trip in the van that's going to be three weeks all up and down New England. Um and that one is going to be crazy because I'm going to try and paint every single day for just about three weeks. So yeah take a look at all those new prints that are going to be released and all of the paintings with the frames. And if you want to be a part of my mail club my subscribers got actually two prints this month. They got this one and this one. I already know what I'm going to send out for the August one. So yeah really glad that you're here. Um so if you want to subscribe you should because I got a lot of stuff coming. Anyway thanks so much. Bye.