Horton Bay General Store

First of all, for those of you that came to listen to my lecture last night at Charlevoix Circle Of Arts thanks so much for being there! I hope you had a good time and I enjoyed meeting and talking with you! 

Secondly, in case you missed the lecture, part of what I talked about was my process. I know I've done posts on this in the past but I figured it was time for a new one. Many people tell me that it's interesting to see an artist's process and while it's everyday work to me, I do enjoy watching artists in other mediums work their magic. So if you'd like to see the process from start to finish on my latest painting "Horton Bay General Store" you can scroll through the images below. 

 Horton Bay General Store is a neat stop if  you're ever in the Petoskey/Charlevoix area. Located off of Horton Bay Rd, it shares a history with Ernest Hemingway, who spent much of his youth on nearby Walloon Lake and eventually got married in the tiny Horton Bay church. Mr. Hemingway references this store in his "Nick Adams" stories and it is part of the "Hemingway Heritage Trail" in the area. 

This finished painting will be for sale soon at Northgoods in Petoskey.

The first step is penciling the whole thing in. I remove/add things from the reference photos and shuffle some things around. 

When I have everything situated where I want it, I go over the pencil with my handy-dandy nano-liner pen. This pen is waterproof and won't blur when I add the watercolor. 

Then I start coloring everything in like a coloring book. Some of the shading I add while the first layer is still wet so that it will bleed in to each other and have a softer effect. I skip around in my paintings (you can see I painted the sky and then moved to the bottom) and that's so I can keep working while I wait for areas to dry. 

I slowly fill in and shade all of the areas. Sometimes, it takes several layers of paint to get the vibrant colors I like. 

And voila! The finished painting! So nice to see the vibrant greens of summer (and lilacs!) while I'm waiting for the snow to melt.