Painting play

 A mistake I've made twice, kind of intentional, but not... is that I haven't silenced my phone when I go to bed at night.  For those of you on the East coast, I'm 5 hours ahead; on the West coast, 8 hours ahead.  Ideally, I'd not be getting any texts (ding!) in the middle of my nighttime, but I feel a bit ambivalent about being out of touch in case there's important things going on, so I have been getting a few texts that I either see when I wake up in the morning or I see when I hear that ding in the middle of the night.  It's not ideal, but it's not like I can't just sleep longer in the morning if I am up at night.  

So today was one of those days when I didn't really get a full night's sleep last night and, really, it's ok!, it gave me a good excuse to really dig into a book I was reading and to play around with painting.  I didn't feel like getting in the car, but I had blue tiles on my mind (I'm definitely going to go back to some blue-tiled churches this week) so the first thing I wanted to play with was an all-blue painting.

I walked out to the afore-mentioned "best lunch bench in the Algarve" and painted the view in blue.  It was a little windy so I was glad to only be wrestling with one color.   I'll say it can be done, I don't think it's going to be standard practice for me but it was a good exercise.

The other thing that I have been thinking about is the work of many artists I follow who do colorful city sketches.   I like the looseness and energy of their work, but I haven't really tried to tackle a colorful loose watercolor sketch of a city. The sketches are often done on site, but there's plenty of examples of work that starts on site and then is finished in the studio.  I figured I'd go straight to a photo to play with this idea --  This is based on a street in Silves.  Another interesting experiment, I may try to do some plein air city scenes in the coming days.

That, and a load of laundry, sums up my day.