Charles Reid Workshop, Day 4

So today we walked over to the Alamo to do some Plein Air painting. If you never have been to the Alamo, you might be a bit surprised by its size. It's quite small and it is in the middle of downtown San Antonio-

not where you would expect it to be. The inside of it is a museum and it gives us some history of the battle of the Texans with Santa Anna's army.

Here is the Alamo and you can see by the people standing around that its not that grandeous. Charles

started sketching the door and pillars and before he finished the building, he started painting some people

before they left- one was a Trooper with a cowboy hat.

Charles started painting the cowboy first painting the hat negatively because it was a white hat and added shadows to give it form. After he painted the three figures in the lower right, he went back to finish the sketch of the building.

Charles was using his Escoda sable travel brushes and a brass plein air palette (I forgot who makes it, but there is a 12 month waiting list and they are $$$$$).

For the building, Charles was mainly working with warm shades- raw sienna, greens, blues, cad orange, burnt sienna and peacock to darken under the arch in the doorway. He would splash some paint on the paper then connect the shapes.

Adding some sky of cerulean and cad orange in the windows. The painting below is almost finished

Cindy and I using binoculars and camera lens to get a close up of what Charles was painting. Later we tried our hand at painting the Alamo. I painted a quick little sketch of the Alamo and since I finished pretty quickly, I started another painting, but this time it was a close up of just the door. When Charles came around to critique he stopped me. He said that I didn't need to do that, the first paintig was much more interesting. So, I packed it up for the day.

Below is Charles' finished painting of the Alamo. I wanted to purchase it, but didn't have an extra $1900 laying around. Sigh.......