 Funding for Painting Journeys is provided by Veritas. Financial knowledge is power. Be empowered. God's beauty is all around us and my goal as an artist is to capture and interpret that beauty on canvas and to take you, the viewer, along with me on this painting journey. Hello and welcome to Painting Journeys. My name is Kitty Linn-Clish and once again we're going to journey across the canvas. I took a very special trip, a three-week road trip with my granddaughters and my son and for the next few episodes we're going to be giving you some highlights of the places that we stopped. But before we go there, I want to just show you how I completed the Covered Bridge. In our last episode I was working on the Covered Bridge in Suamanko, Wisconsin. Now Covered Bridges are soon becoming a thing of the past so this was a real find to come upon one that was so in such good shape and it looked like it had been refurbished and the land around it, everything just seemed to have a beautiful glow and even though it was right across the street from the new zoo in Suamanko I chose to paint the Covered Bridge for you. So there it is, all finished up for you. I hope you like it. And now let me tell you a little bit about the Petrified Forest. We traveled along, we went through Missouri of course and different places, getting to Arizona and we weren't going to really stop here at the Petrified Forest. We weren't going to stop, it was just kind of like a last minute decision to stop but I'm really glad we did because I found out some really interesting information I want to share with you. So here we are and off in the distance now looking at the photograph, now I must tell you that this photograph does not do the area justice because it was so much more colorful and more beautiful but it was the best one I could take. But anyway off in the distance up in here behind this particular area right in through here is the painted desert and you can see that. In 1907, well I guess it was about 1888, settlers came upon this area and petrified trees and the painted desert and then in 1907 President Roosevelt turned it into a national park which without his having done that we wouldn't have lost a lot of the beauty that we have in the United States today. So anyway, this what we're going to be painting today, what I chose as my subject to paint today for you is the petrified or the, it's called the granite bridge and it's a tree that perhaps as far back as 200 million years ago was in a swamp like area wetlands and floods came and it was buried and more things happened and layers upon layers upon layers until finally it actually turned into granite. It's totally petrified. This right under here is a cement girder that they put underneath the tree to try to help keep it from breaking. As the, well as I'm showing you in this picture right now the water running under this has washed away this area down below here and it will eventually wear all of this away, you know, maybe in thousands of years. The water is the one thing that nature cannot control. It keeps changing our landscapes wherever. So anyway, this is the granite bridge and some cliffs and things and so I better get busy and I'll talk to you more about what I saw there as we go along. Okay, don't want that to be quite so dark but I do love the purple in the sky and I'm going to just try to work a little faster here so that I can get to the good part. Yeah, that's where we want to go to the good part. We'll have that little bit of blue swirling through here. I think that's the most yummy color of blue. Yeah, I have just a regular palette today. It's just, you know, my usual palette, I never vary. I think each artist has their own that they really like and work with. They become used to, they know what to expect. You put the colors together and you know what to expect and that's very important to an artist to be able to determine beforehand or have some idea beforehand just what the outcome is going to be. Otherwise it just becomes a series of happy accidents and a few of those are wonderful but you don't want to base your whole painting on them. That's for sure. So anyway, we had a wonderful time. This was such an informative, great trip. It was a chance for my granddaughters, they're 12 and 9 and my son who was soon going to be 45 and it was a chance for all of us to bond and what else do you do when you're in the car for 8, 10, 12 hours a day? But it was wonderful. I had some second thoughts on this whole trip but I wanted the girls to have the opportunity that their dad and their uncle had when we lived in California. Every year we'd drive back to Wisconsin to see relatives and those boys were always being taken every summer on this road trip and the sad part about the road trip is of course we were younger and young family and would have to travel really fast and drive straight through and there was no stopping at a park or anything like that. It just wasn't, there wasn't time and so I wanted my granddaughters and my son to see what they'd been missing by taking the time and doing it right and seeing what they had been missing. Okay, I really like that sky. I'm going to lighten it just a little bit more for you and because I want the colors of the desert, the painted desert right in here to really show up. So I'm going to lighten that just a little bit more but before the paint sets up I'm going to take my soft brush and I'm just going to gently stroke down because the sky goes down and around so you naturally want the paint brushes, the paint brushing strokes rather to not go across because that catches the eye. So if I want this to go way back and look very far back I'll show you what I do. It's very lightly, very, very lightly run this brush. It's so, I'm touching it so softly it's like a butterfly's kiss in the palm of your hand. There we go and then wipe it and hit it again just a couple in a couple of places and there. Now it really looks like it's going down and around behind the sky, I mean behind the land since the world is round and not flat that sky has to go down and around and behind. Okay, now we're going to get into that desert a little bit but first of all we have this very blue, dark looking Mesa right back in here and to explain this a little bit to you what I have done here is I've done a very rough sketch sort of in the colors that I plan on using. I just wanted it, you know what I did is I call it like mapping it out. I just sort of mapped it out on my canvas to make sure that what I was going to get it. I didn't include everything because there may be some things on the canvas that I don't include in the picture that I don't include in the canvas. Okay, can you tell I'm excited today? I am excited, I'm sorry. I'm stumbling over my words a little bit. Okay, here we go. Now we're going with that Mesa and it's way back there and it's nice and light. We don't really see it a lot and then there's a little bit of dark that's coming back here and we get a different brush and I'm just going to come over this and soften that down and there again that gives it the feel that it's way back there. No hard edges in the back. There we go, nice and soft. Alright, now we have the painted desert. I'm painting from the back forward so I want to get some of that desert in there. Now I'm going a little brighter than what you see here in the photograph because I was there and I know that that's the way it looked so that gives me a nice opportunity to... Well, and not only that, but you know, if we were going to make a photograph, copy this photograph, it wouldn't really be very pretty because photographs... If you want a photograph, you use a camera just like I did up above. There we go, now we've got a painted desert started in there. You don't need much. Just a little touch here and there. There we go. Some darks maybe. There should we lighten it a little bit. Yeah, maybe we should lighten it a little bit. There we go, okay. Yeah, that looks nice. Alright, now we have this dark, this dark kind of a green line and it's light coming right here. Let me see here. Let's mix up some nice light and I see I didn't put one color on my palette that I need. So let's see how ingenious I can be and try to make that color with the colors that I do have on my palette. Maybe that's not too bad. Right in here, we have a little bit of light and of course there's a lot of green stuff and dark stuff. This should be a little lighter. A little trees and cactus, not cactus but brush-like. This really isn't considered like the desert where you have the cactuses in Arizona. This is more just like high country, high plains country. So that's coming down there like so and this is coming up here like so and that's coming down. There was a building there that had been partially restored and it was this large lodge. It seems as though people had been inhabiting this area for as far back as they can tell right now for 1300 years and this large lodge at one time had over a hundred rooms in it and 200 plus people lived in it. That was really interesting to see. There were other things too. There were smaller buildings that were there and just sitting there I don't know if these were restored or what but they were interesting little interesting little buildings that were around and just kind of nestled in these little gullies and creek beds and it was really quite the place. I think one of my favorite stops as we drove through this and you know it's right off of I-40 so it's really very easy to get to. The park you only drive 27, 28 miles south to get to it and it makes a nice circle right out. Anyway, one of the places that I thought was really great was this, they call it newspaper rock and it had all these rocks that had crumpled and crumbled and fallen down and everything but the way they had fallen you could still see the petroglyphs the writings that were etched into the rocks by the natives that had lived there at that time. So I'm showing you right now I'm showing you a picture of the sign that shows the different symbols that are carved on the rock that is down below that we're looking at and now I'm showing you a picture of a close-up of the actual rock it's very interesting how to think what tools must they have used to carve into the rocks like this and make these petroglyphs and the stories that they must tell the symbols, what do they stand for? Of course there's a hand and a circle and you can read a lot into it if you have a good imagination. I think that a very, very interesting place a wonderful place. Alright now let me focus back on this a little bit here. We have a dark rock up here in the distance but he has a little bit of red to him. See now and he's coming up above right in there. Needs to be darker so that he shows a little bit better. Whoa, too dark to cut that guy down. By taking a flat brush and laying it down I softened the paint and made it go into the I'm working on canvas board. Now I want to put a little bit of a but anyway I pushed it in and made it look a little better. Now I'll put a little bit of orange on the side of it here to show that he's there. Okay and I want to darken the bottoms of these trees a little bit here and then there's some more right over in here a little bit up in there and then there's quite a grouping right in here. So we'll just kind of scumble it on we're trying to work fast because we want to give you something that well actually I can't wait to get to the to the granite bridge. I just think that's so cool when I saw the sign that said granite bridge I said to my son oh stop here stop here we have to stop here I want to see that. There we go. I think that as I'm coming forward I'm seeing that I want a little more color in that desert back there in the painted desert a little more color in there. There we go. That should come down like that and then I think what I'm going to do is take my knife and scrape up a nice amount of paint here. Can you hear that scratchy sound? I know it sounds awful doesn't it like fingernails on a blackboard. There we go. Okay now I think what I'm going to do here is I want to take this and make that look more like the desert there and have that come up there so that we can see that the other is beyond it. Then I'm going to wipe this out right in here and there's that green brush. Okay now we've got more but we've got some trees that have a little bit of purple in them. That's good. Whoops. Just started a new pile here. They look like they're kind of a purple gray. There we go. Okay. Now that's going to be pretty. They look like actual trees right here and coming right over in here. Those look like actual trees. There we go. And there again because it's in the background I want to soften the edges because that's a long ways away. Maybe I'll put a nice little tree trunk there on it. I know that's detail but I'm kind of doing finishes I go. Yeah there we go. Nice little tree trunk in here. The other one over here there we go. Makes more sense that way. And we'll take that brush again that lavender lighten up just a little bit and ooh that's pretty. That's a pretty color. Let's see what that looks like on there. If that doesn't make it pop a little bit well it sure does. That's pretty. There we go. All right now I'm going to get this green in but first of all I want to take my knife again and I want to make that desert spot. This is where I have to mix up the paint because I didn't bring the right color with me. I don't know why I forgot that. It's a staple on my palette. So let's see here. It's good to stretch yourself. Everyone's to know why. You run across a problem in the painting and you have to stretch yourself and that's a good thing. This is happening to me right now. I think I like this. I think I came up with something that looks pretty darn good. Now you notice I'm working with the knife as well as the brush because I want that rugged feel of all those different textures that those rocks have. Coming right up here is a rock and it's got some dark in front of it and then there's a little bit of light right in here that's coming down and then this is just a little bit more red right over in here and maybe we'll just have some of this coming into this a little bit to kind of make that look a little more like it's movement. Okay, I like that. Let's see. Let me make these guys just a little brighter here. I'm just kind of poking at the canvas right now. I'm not painting things. I'm painting my impression of shapes and values. Okay, and that little tree right there is coming down in front. So we're going to make it come down right in front right in here. There we go. Okay, let's see here. There I did. Now I want to take a darker color that is in my shadow color and I want to put that right in here and that's going to be right in here too. You see this right in here? Yeah, that's what we got right there. It's a little darker right there and that's coming down quite a ways and I can't believe it. We're already halfway through the show. My wonderful cameraman, Richard, just gave me the note here. We're halfway, but I'm not halfway across the canvas so I better get my rear and gear, huh? Okay. First of all, I want some more of that light to go across the top of this here. A little lighter so that we can see. There we go. And okay, probably thinking a little too much about detail here. This is coming down more like that and then we do have some areas in here that are darker. Okay. That gets darker as it goes down. So I'm really glad that you joined me today. I'm happy to take you on this journey to the Petrified Forest in Arizona. It was a great trip and I hope through my painting and the photographs that I've showed you, I hope that you can get just a small feel of what it was like to be there. There were many, many things that I didn't get a chance to see there. Time would not allow it, but it was quite an experience, believe me. I'm interested in anything that shows how things were years and years and years ago. I think that's fascinating and it's so marvelous that we are doing as much as we are to protect these areas. There was a wonderful group of young students that were there and a female ranger that didn't look a lot older than them. She was busy showing them the ropes and telling them where not to stand and walk and how important it was to leave no footprint. It was very informative and it was just a wonderful talk that she gave to these young people and you could tell that they were listening to her so intently and that it really mattered to them what they were doing. That was really heartening to know that our younger generation is going to carry on and protect these places for us so that we'll have them for years and years to come to visit. That was very exciting moving those trees down there. I think we need some more darks in here. Come up, there's a lot of dark on there. There we go. Right in here is the dark purple again from the shadow, this area right here. I believe that is coming about like this and coming down. That's a little higher right there. I don't want that to be quite so sharp. I'm going to wipe that off a little bit there. I'm going to come out like that a little bit more. There we go. And then this is light up here again and in here and in here. It's kind of light. There's a light spot right here and this is coming down right there. I don't know about this dead tree right here. He's not petrified, that's for sure. But no one hurt to put him in there. I just put a few indications of him having been there. We saw him. It wasn't the best thing we saw that day but he was there. The funniest thing happened, I have to tell you. There were crows in the parking lot and the crow, this one particular crow especially, had a very funny gait. He would take a couple steps and then he would hop and he was favoring one leg and he was mooching for food, begging for food from people in the parking lot and a lot of people were feeding him because he was cute. He was really good at his little act of trying to beg people to feeding him. Anyway, he took a liking to my youngest granddaughter and he started following her everywhere and around the parking lot and it was really cute. I got some adorable pictures of that but I'm not going to bore you with family pictures but anyway it was really cute. He just hopped around begging and he would give him something and then he would hop away and then he would act like he was crippled and do his little dance. It was really kind of funny. I think we are getting kind of a desert-like look there. This over here is quite light. I almost need a bigger knife here. Let's see here. There are some rocks right in there and this is coming like this. You notice how when I put the shadow on I go up and down and then when I am putting the top on then I go back and forth and that helps just describe the movement. It's not ready. Let me see here. I'm not going to put this in. I don't think it enhances anything. I'll just put another green bush there instead. There is some dark rocks right here standing upright. There's a little one right in there and we'll put some dark underneath the tree here. Now I'm going to start on my log, my bridge. Let's see here. I'm quiet because I'm thinking so hard. I want this to turn out really nice for you and I don't usually work with a pallet knife but I'm really enjoying it today. I want this to turn out nice. Now nice light on the top. I'm quiet because I'm thinking this is going to be the top of it. It needs to be lighter. If you can see this right here on the picture you can't see it but there's a barrier right here so that you're not supposed to go down on this path and stand on this and somebody is actually crept over here and tried to dig up, pull the petrified rock and take a piece of it. Some people and their kids, huh? Let's see if we can get this to look a little better here. This is coming over here and into it. Oh my goodness. Now we only have 15 minutes left. Where does the time go? I wish I could just have a couple of hours to spend with you doing this and then I wouldn't rush so much. Now this cement girder that seems to be holding this agate tree up is right under here and it's really quite dark right there. So let's see here. We need a lot more paint here, kitty. Gotta get moving. Just have 15 minutes. That's not too much time. Half of the canvas covered. Okay, now it's a little lighter. A little bluer. Almost has a kind of a reddish glow to it. It's kind of a pretty color. Let's see if we can pump it up a little bit and make it really sing here. White maybe in it. Let's see here. That's one thing when you're working with a palette knife you really use a lot more paint. And I think we've got a little more of a reddish glow in here. We need to pull that out. There we go. And this down here is quite dark. There's a little square right in here that's very dark where that meets and that meets there. And then these rocks right here are coming down in there a little darker. Right in there, that shadow. A little bit of a cast shadow right in there. That breaks coming through there. And I just want to make this look a little rounder here. I think we could probably do it if we go like this a couple places. And then drag it back. There, that looks a little rounder. Okay. Alright, then maybe a little bit more light in here. So this doesn't look quite so... Yeah, that's what I wanted. Some brightness to that. There we go. Alright, now let's see here. Right here we've got sand color. And that's coming down right there. Right over in here and down. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm not going to be able to finish this for you. I'm going to have to take it home and finish it in my studio at home. I had really hoped to get further along today, but we have ten minutes left here. We'll see what we can get done, but I don't know. We don't want to ruin the painting by rushing and making it look too strange. Alright, let's see. All of this down below is a very dark green. If we can get that on with some light over it, maybe we can still save this puppy, pull him out of the fire. I think my brush would probably be quicker. We'll take this brush and just sock it to it. There we go. That's quicker. Darker over in here because there's a block holding it up right there. Some kind of a girder thing or something. Have you ever noticed how I don't know the names of things? I just, you know, and I don't really even care. I don't care that I don't know the names of things. They're just colors and shapes. To me, I don't really care. Looking like a bridge, I think it is. We could probably take some of this and put a few little highlights across here. I've got to get away from that bridge and keep working on what I'm working on here. Alright, let's see here. So we're putting that dark green in on the bottom because we're trying to show you what that's going to look like when we've got those trees underneath there. There's some trees right in here. We'll have to come back and hit that with a little bit of the lighter green that we're seeing and it's coming right up on top of this. I want something here brighter. Okay, and then this is darker, a little darker green right in here and it's going up underneath this and over here. Alrighty. Are we going to do it? Are we going to get this covered? If we do, it'll be a miracle. It's going like this. This is coming down like that and that's coming down like that. Alright, we're going to get the big knife. Get the big guy. Hurry, hurry, hurry. And here we go. And this is coming up like this and coming down like that. Okay, five minutes to go. We're going to make it. Are you with me? Are you still with me? Yes. Say yes, we're with you. We're in this together. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're going to accomplish it. Yes, we are. Care how messy it is because that part we can fix. We just want to get that canvas covered. You know, I am just having a blast. And I'm really glad that you join me today and watch me as I play Crazy Lady with my palette knife and my paints. This is really a lot of fun. I don't know which was more fun, the trip, being there or being here with you and painting my version of the painted desert and the granite bridge. You know, it's pretty colorful. That's a good thing. There we go. Just this little tad right in here. Okay, and there's some greenery here. Okay, and we'll put a couple little lumps in it. Let me see here. We'll put a little lump. We'll put a little light right in here. We'll put a little dark right in here. And then we'll put some light right here coming along and over in here, some color. And we'll put just a little more light right in here because I want this to really pop right in there. Well, you have been watching painting journeys for a long time. My name is Kitty Lynn Klisch. It was a joy to be with you today. I hope that you'll tune in for our next episode when I think we're going to go to the Grand Canyon. How does that sound? Okay, catch you next time. Bye-bye for now.