Day 599

More winter. It's a lot of fun to scratch back into paint. It's also a lot of fun to figure out where/how you want to have some areas of focus and contrast in an otherwise relatively soft construction. Most of the effort here was in setting things up for the line of branches and bare shrubs across the middle.

The reference for this piece (what? You think I'll paint outdoors in freezing sleet?) was gathered on a day when I was trying out my new neoprene, waterproof hunting boots. The only thing I hunt is a better lighting setup, but it also leads to a lot of time spent standing relatively still in water with ice on it. This day I got some great shots by simply wading up the bed of the little river in this image. It allowed me to see angles that were previously inaccessible and also avoided messing things up with footprints in the snow.

Of course, I got overconfident and tried it on another little stream and almost sank above my boot-tops in mud and silt. It took until almost dark to extricate myself without losing my boots or falling over.