Preparing for the seminar I am teaching at the Yellowstone Association Institute in a few weeks gives me the opportunity to revisit the sketches I made in my last two visits to Yellowstone. In our May 2008 visit we encountered lingering snow in many of the thermal areas. The cold morning air made the vapors more dramatic, and the white snow against the brilliant colors of the hot springs was even more beautiful than the pale sinter one sees later in the season. For this pool in the Midway Geyser Basin, I used phthalo blue red shade and phthalo blue green shade with carbazole violet. The green algae in the foreground were created with hansa yellow and phthalo blue red shade, plus a little bit of quinacridone burnt orange. The mountains in the background, west of the basin, were alot of fun--the pattern of the snow lying in gullies helped to establish the contours of the range.
Old Faithful presented other challenges. The expanse of sinter in the foreground is relatively unvaried in color and texture. I dragged my brush to give a bit of texture and shape to the area. For the geyser, I wet the entire sky area and painted around the geyser eruption. I followed the same method for the ridge in the middle ground, but found I had to re-wet it once it was dry and do a little wiping out of color.
The May Yellowstone trip is an annual event for our good friends Gerry Fuller and Dave Maertz. We have met them twice, along with many of their friends. Dave and Gerry have a great blog --Dave does much of the very funny travel writing (read it and you will be laughing out loud!) and Gerry takes beautiful photos. Here my husband David and I pose atop Specimen Ridge with Dave and Glenn Dreger, Canadian outdoorsman and photographer par excellence
. And another photo with me and Gerry, dear friend and fellow adventurer since college days together at the University of Minnesota. We have hiked together on mnay occasions. One day we will make a repeat attempt to get to Cascade Pass.
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