Color Shift

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

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A Fine Season Oil

Fall colors have us changing our palette mixes as we move away from the deep greens of summer and spend more time with our yellows, reds, and earth colors. On the ground around us in the Midwest, the native grasses turn bright orange and russet and work nicely with the bright reds and crimsons of sumacs and wild burning bushes. Poison ivy vines finally redeem themselves to us by lifting their bright reds high into the yellow-greens and golds of the trees. It is one of the finer moments to get outdoors and paint, and it helps to relieve our melancholy as the leaves drop from the sky. We love painting in the fall, so much so that we took a trip down to Abiquiu, New Mexico a couple of weeks ago to paint the high altitude change of colors of the cottonwoods and aspen trees. Spectacular.

With all this color drama happening, we thought it would be a good time to re-present one of our extensive articles on …