Atop Guanella Pass

A plein air painting for Georgetown Plein Air 2026. From the top of Guanella Pass.

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Lately I’ve been watching more art demos by accomplished artists, and they all emphasize the importance of thumbnail sketches and value studies. I haven't been incorporating these techniques into my plein air practice, often for the same unoriginal reasons that many other artists avoid them. However, I've started to realize that this has been a mistake on my part.
I met my artist friend at a trailhead a couple days prior and we both stopped to appreciate the barn at the parking area. We said we could definitely just stay and paint there but decided to walk the trail anyways. On this day I got up early and decided to go back to that barn and paint it as a warm up for the day. It is not a subject I am used to painting and honestly I went into this painting thinking of it as practice. Because I am often trying to improve skill I will do low stakes paintings with some kind of challenge to them. I try to go after my weaknesses as an artist, so I did two thumbnail sketches with alcohol markers. They were really fun to do and people that came to hike the trail enjoyed them. I had a few of them point to their favorite of the two and they all aligned with my own choice, so I went into painting it with confidence.

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