January 2026 - Painting of the Month

I’ve been wanting to paint NCAR! And I support science! I have a whole album of NCAR photos on my phone now, and I envision doing a series of NCAR paintings in the future. I’m declaring my first painting of NCAR as my January painting of the month.

“NCAR, Sentinel on the Hill”
10x10 inches, acrylic on wood
$250

To share a little behind-the-scenes of my painting process, I typically start my paintings with a sketch. Then I add some of the darker values.

Next I add background colors, which are usually an “opposite” color to what will be painted on top. For example, here the sky will be blue, so I chose orange as a background color. The rocks and the building are a pinkish orange, so I chose blue as that background color. The trees are green, so I chose red as background, and the hillside was yellowish, so I chose pink as the background.

In the final painting, you can see some of the background colors peeking through, though you might have to look at the bigger image above to be able to see this! (I always want to write peaking for peeking, anyone else?!)

And this month, I painted my biggest painting yet! This is a scene from our Capitol Reef National Park trip last October. We had a wonderful dinner at Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, and on our drive back to the campground, we saw this lovely sunset against the rocks.

“Sunset After Dinner at Hell’s Backbone Grill”
24x36 inches, acrylic on canvas
$800 (or $950 framed)

Here it is staged with an app I use. (My house isn’t this cool.) Can you see some of those background colors? Up to now, my largest painting was 20x20 inches, and this one is 24x36 inches. These bigger canvases and frames take up space, and I’m starting to dream about a bigger painting studio!

I was honored to do a couple of dog portraits last month. They were top secret since they were commissioned as Christmas presents, but now it’s safe to share them.

Max

Farley

It was a joy to paint these two cutie pie dogs. Questions and comments are welcome.

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Sending you my best wishes!