It’s going to be a bumpy road
The first day was easy. It always is. It’s the second day that’s hard—especially when the second day is a Monday. Mondays are catch-up days. Take care of the house days. Make all those stupid personal-business call days. Before you know it, dinner’s over and you still haven’t been in the studio days.
Sunset looked like it might be nice, though. Yeah, drawing the sunset, that’s what I’d do on Day 2. Except I was tired. Really tired. So I grabbed my phone and walked around the house, taking some quick snaps of the western horizon.
Day 2: Tetilla Peak at sunset, February 24, 2025.
Tetilla Peak is in the Cochiti Pueblo, on the east side of Cochiti Lake, in Sandoval County. It’s the primary mountain on the horizon of my western studio window. The name given it by the Spanish explorers translates pretty directly to Tit Mountain, just as the French trappers named the Tetons of Wyoming after the female breast. Evidently exploring was a lonely business, attracting men with a ribald sense of humor.
Taking snapshots is not the point to my version of #the100dayproject, however. Photos are a means to an end, and a sort of substitute for the days I don’t work direct from life. So Tuesday morning, I sat down with my sketchbook, cropped the photo on my tablet screen to a square, and rendered the landscape in colored pencil.
Satisfying to draw an image to completion in one work session! Not so thrilled with the “cuteness” level, though. Is it the sweet pastel palette? Or the sort of folk-artsy shaggy tree textures? The turquoise band near the horizon is a bit too light for my taste, and the rigidly gridded “wove” texture of the Tiziano paper used in the sketchbook really shows up under the colored pencil strokes.
Landscape artist’s tip: Partly cloudy or even mostly cloudy days are the best weather for photographing or painting sunrises or sunsets en plein air. The sun’s light refracts through the atmosphere, bouncing off the clouds, creating the dramatic streaks and contrasts of color for a satisfying composition. On clear evenings, the sky will be a simple gradient from the dark indigo of the stratosphere to pale cyan just above an orange or red streak at the horizon, where the sun’s rays scatter through the dust layer in the sky just above the ground.
