Sunset in Big Sur

This is a new painting I did for the Salinas gallery. I used several photos I'd taken at Big Sur and Cozumel (just for the sky) as reference. I used the lighting from some photos and the rocks and water from other photos and used my imagination to figure out how those objects would look in the different light. It was pretty challenging, but it turned out pretty good I think.

At 24" by 36", this is the biggest painting I've ever done. It took 15 scans to get it all scanned into the computer - luckily I recently got a newer, faster scanner and it only took about 45 minutes to do that. I then carefully pieced it together in Photoshop. Unfortunately, the bright areas of the painting were bleached out a bit. I'll have to learn how to override the scanner's "smart" exposure adjustment in the future. (I don't think it's very smart in this case!)

This time I used acrylic instead of oil. The oil paintings just take so long to dry that I thought I should build up an inventory with some acrylic and multi-media paintings before I do more oils.