"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.