American Electric Power used to surface mine coal in McConnelsville, Ohio. Then, in the 1940’s, AEP Stopped mining and turned the land back to nature. Over the next sixty years, they planted 60 million trees, and built dozens of camp grounds, each with dozens of primitive camp sites. They maintained the entire area, reserving it for camping, fishing, and hunting until a few years ago, when they sold the land to the State of Ohio to create the Jesse Owens State Park. Today the area remains wild and undeveloped. It’s still free to camp there, and the best part – there’s still no cell service.

Every year in August I go camping there with friends from College. We are usually stay there for five or six days during which we fish, sleep in tents, cook over a fire, and whittle spoons. It’s one of my favorite things to do every year.

We usually set up camp at “the covered bridge spot.” We park near the road, and haul all our gear over this covered bridge, and the entire area on the other side is ours. It’s easily the biggest, most gorgeous camp site I’ve ever used – and it’s free… amazing.

This painting is my attempt to paint that covered bridge. I decided to paint this from my own memory, so there are some inaccuracies. (The roof is much much flatter than depicted here.) As I keep working on this painting, I’ll try to fix that so it’s more accurate.

Anyway, I decided to paint it from memory because trying to paint it from photos hasn’t worked in the past. I feel like I end up being a slave to the photo, and it loses the mood and the overall feel that I’m after.

Here’s a good example – in this painting I tried to accurately represent the bridge. This one was painted on site, so it’s not from a photo, but it suffers from the same problem. I’m thinking less about composition, and more about being accurate. The result is a junk drawer of elements with no clear story or focus.

So, I decided first to paint a bunch of thimbnails. I really should do this step more often – it helps me learn about the composition and discover things that are going to be problems. It also helps me wuickly brainstorm possible solutions to the problems, and experiment with techniques that I can use to solve the problems.

If you look at these thumbnails, you can see the things that I am wrestling with. The first thumbnail feels flat and busy. So, I softened the trees behind the bridge to convey the depth of field. This helps a lot by setting the stage and clearly defining a foreground, midground and background.

The next few attempts I experimented with ways to represent the trees and shrubs to the right of the bridge, and also explore some options for the trees behind the bridge. I concluded that the trees in the background should be all soft edges – that’s the best way to push that content back.

The trees in the foreground still felt busy, so I tried painting the huge gum tree that you can’t see in any of the photos. As I kept experimenting, I tried a number of different ways to represent to trees and shrubs. I worried that the tree being so close to the left edge of the composition wouldn’t feel right, so I tried a bunch of different ways to render the image without that tree. When I finished painting all of these, I couldn’t help but look at those versions – so I decided to move forward with that composition.

You can also see me experimenting with different perspectives. This is a perfect demonstration of why these thumbnails are so helpful. The perspective offered by the photo can’t be changed – it is what it is. But if I’m painting this scene from memory, I am free to move to a different spot in the field and paint the bridge from a different vantage point. I can even paint it from an imagined perspective. This isn’t something The resulting image isn’t representative of a photo you could take with a camera, but it does a better job of communicating what I’m after.

After all of those experiments, I moved on to a 1/8th sheet painting today. There are a lot of things I like about this, and a fee things I want to differently on the next attempt.

Things I like:

I like how the background was represented. So I’ll try to emulate that again. It’s all just wet in wet. First I made that area all wet, then I added the blue trees in the far distance. Then, I used yellow to make the green closer trees, but kept them wet in wet. This gives the feeling that there are two different stages in the background, the distant trees are blue, and the closer trees are more green, but because everything has soft edges, it stays in the background.

I like the way I represented the roof. It was rendered by painting clean water into streaks on the roof, so the roof was partially dry, and partially wet. Then, I painted on the dry parts, and pulled the paint into the wet parts – this gave the crisp edges that bloomed into puddles off pigment. I’m going to experiment more with this.

I like parts of the tree. The fine lines that suggest bark I think worked well. And I like the way the negative painting in the shrub anchored the tree in the composition.

The bridge I like how the doorway has a brighter spot near the opening. That was accomplished by dropping clean water into that corner while everything was still wet.

And I like the composition overall.

Things I don’t like:

I don’t like how steep the pitch is. The bridge is nowhere near that steep, so I’ll need to fix that – or at least experiment with fixing it. Who knows, maybe that steep angle will be needed? I will probably need to try some new thumbnails to experiment with that.

I don’t like the way the cut aways inside the bridge are lined up. I think they should be lower.

I don’t like how the branch going to the left feels like its coming directly from the side, I want it to feel more like it’s behind the main trunk, I think that would make it feel more three dimensional.

I don’t like how steep the hill is. In real life this is a very gradual hill, and if anything the bridge is below the viewer. The way its represented here the bridge feels far too high above the viewer. While I’m not trying to be a slave to accuracy, this feels a bit too far from real life for me.

So, there you have it. This is the painting I’m working on right now.

I also painted this a few days ago.

This is me following a tutorial from Joseph Zbukvic’s book “Mastering Atmosphere and Mood in Watercolor.”