Death Valley: Thursday-Friday, March 24-25, 2011.

The Dunes.
On Day 2 we went to the Dunes.  I hoped and planned on doing a bunch of watercolors at the dunes, unfortunately, I did not really think ahead!  Sand and wind were my enemy, and they were at their most sandy and windy.

I did find that drawing at the dunes was OK, but I was having pen troubles.  I ran out of Noodler's ink, an ink introduced to me by Dean Gustafson, and my fountain pen did not like to go back to my old ink.

Here is my first Watercolor of the day, and the most successful.  The wind and sand held off for most of the time I was painting this one, but slowly crept up on me.  My colors started to seem really granulated!  I thought that perhaps my paints were old, but it was sand!  Very quickly after that my pallet began to fill with sand and I had to stop and clean it out.

2nd and last watercolor of the day.  It got really comic! My pallet was full of sand, and the sand was sticking to all the wet areas of the painting!  The cool thing, actually, was that when the painting was dry and I wiped off all the sand particles  an interesting effect was left behind, so maybe it was not so bad after all!  If I ever get to try this again I'll just have to figure out how to protect the pallet.  

Dunes.

Dunes simplified.

I really loved trying to get the flow of the Dunes, even if I did not quite succeed.

Some Pencil attempts...
Another thing I failed to take into account was the time of day.  We were at the Dunes in the middle of the day, from noon to about 3:30, so there were not many shadows.  The Dunes were very bright when the sun was out and flat when the cloud cover arrived.  Early morning and late evening are the best times to see the Dunes.  I'll know better next time.

Non photo blue pencil...

Friday, Day 3.  This small range of mountain shapes was to be found opposite the entrance to the Hole in the Wall wash where we were camped.  I was pretty obsessed with wanting to draw and paint this particular part of that range.  It's the front part of what is called 20 Mule Team Canyon.

The same mountain again, in watercolor.

My second attempt, a little smaller.  I think this came out better.  I should have kept going with the watercolors, instead I moved on to Zabriski Point to try an Oil.

My last drawing of the trip.  At Zabriski Point.  The shadows were very deep and lovely at this time of day but I chose to ignore them in favor of just capturing the lines of the hills.  I took lots of photos, so perhaps I'll do some work from those later on.