Wait until you are in front of your outdoor painting scene before deciding what to tone your surface. I've found that how you prepare your canvas has a huge impact on the finished result of your plein...

In a recent post on how to paint clouds at sunset , we diagrammed a pastel painting and explained a bit about the types of clouds one may encounter when painting outdoors . This time, we have dissected...

Do you ever feel like you’re just painting the same old same old when you go outside to paint? Couple of trees, maybe some water—it’s actually fairly easy to fall into the rut of painting...

John and Ann’s recent post about painting water en plein air was so inspiring and right on target. I love painting water elements, too, because they always make plein air landscape paintings more...

Here's John using his heavy-weight watercolor gear while painting in Colorado. Through trial and error, over the years, we have figured out how to pack for our foot-powered plein-air painting adventures...

Water is perhaps one of the more challenging subjects to paint convincingly in a plein air landscape painting. Whether one is inspired by the ocean, a river, or a pond or lake, each subject requires a...

This plein air painting by Tom Brown is impressionistic, but gives you a distinct sense of the form and structure of the scrub tree he's painting. We often think of trees in a very human way—that...

The lesson we first learned when living and painting in the Hudson Valley in New York is that as plein air painters there is a deep pleasure to be gained from becoming intimately familiar with the same...