"Umstead Light, 2015," is 40x30", acrylic on canvas.  I knew I wanted to do a scene from our local Umstead Forest so I asked my coworker to under-paint the canvas in a deep dark green.  It is a similar approach as creating a pastel painting using a colored or toned paper.  It basically "kills the white," as we say in artist circles.  It puts you in a neutral position on the gray scale and then you can just focus on playing with lights and darks.  In this particular scene, I wanted to emphasize the dramatic shadows one encounters in a forest.  The painting is as a whole intended to be rather dark so as to really draw the eye to the starkly illuminated creek bed.  I did not want to overly define this scene so I left some areas minimally developed.  This painting happened very quickly for me, a total of 7 hours (thanks to starting with a toned background).  I will include some process photos below.

This is actually an older painting that I revisited.  I did this during my first year at SAS, in 2000.  We needed large colorful canvases for a new cafe and the accent color in the space was red.  This is a stylized interpretation of a scene on SAS campus.  I don't think I would create this painting now so it's kind of fun to come back to it.  The changes I made were subtle.  I toned down and warmed up the colors at bit (believe it or not!) and I added lights to the lower horizon to emphasize the negative shapes in the trees.  Other than that, I tried to preserve what I was aiming to accomplish WAY back when I was 23.  :)  Oh, this is big, 48x60", and it's one of my first acrylic paintings.  Back then, I was still very new to the medium and not totally comfortable with it.  I would not have predicted it would become my favorite.  There's a companion piece to this that I will tweak next and post shortly.

Here is the companion piece, "St. Paul Skyline, 2015," 36x48" acrylic on canvas.  This was a really fun project and I think I will remember this technique for future city-scape paintings.