Storm Over Yampa Valley

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Every summer, in late July, I do a plein air workshop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado hosted by The Steamboat Art Museum. After you come down from Rabbit Ears Pass this ranch is just before you come to the town of Steamboat Springs. It was an original homestead and remains a working ranch. The ranch house has large windows in the dining room and, it if starts raining, we can move inside and paint vistas like this one.

It was a cloudy day and I did this demo to show how the weather can be an important subject. The clouds were constantly changing and I painted them with different grays mixed with brilliant orange and cerulean blue. Including some pure cerulean blue and a little rose dore, I was careful to have a combination of hard and soft edges and shapes of unpainted white paper. The hardest thing for me when painting skies is to get it working, leave it alone, and then let the water and paint do some of the work. There is always the temptation to go back and work into the sky but this is often a recipe for disaster. If I do decide to make any subtle changes, I wait until the area is perfectly dry.

Another concern was how the sky dropped behind the mountains and I captured this with a combination of hard and soft edges where the tops of the mountains touch the sky. Next I painted the closest mountain and the distant trees as a single shape running across the middle ground. I wanted to keep this area simple so that the sky would dominate but I did include a distant barn with a red roof and a few fence posts. Moving forward in the hayfield, I made sure to include a few horizontal brushstrokes and some value changes. I like to use the juxtaposition of large elements with small things in the foreground and I accomplished by working with the wooden fence and tall grasses. Also, having one of the fence posts overlap the hayfield and some of the distant trees adds a nice sense of depth to the composition.

The distant mountains are cerulean blue with cobalt violet and the trees are olive green with French ultramarine blue. Yellow ochre and olive green were used for the hayfield and the fence posts were a mixture of burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue. The years I lived in Steamboat Springs are some of my fondest memories and I always enjoy returning to paint the beauty of the Yampa Valley. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton