DON'S BARN AND WATER PUMP

Back in the fall, a local town held a Herbst Tour (Herbst = Autumn in German).  Many farms and homes were open to show their horses, cattle, artwork, bakery goods, pumpkins, etc.  Sweetie and I took the self-driving tour on a glorious fall day this year.  We stopped to see Don, a photographer buddy.  

Don's home is one I'd love, with a farm pond, a gazebo, and a gorgeous maple tree at the end of his lane.  I took a photo of an outbuilding/barn he had that was old and weathered.  I think that's a water pump in front. 

Anyway, I had this photo lying around since fall and decided it would be a good one to try for my painting-without-drawing challenge.  I see now it needs more to really make it look dimensional - the grass and stone under the well look flat.  But I guess the challenge is to do this quickly, without pre-drawing, and get as much as I can in one go.  I may return to this and pump up the volume a little here and there.  The photo really shows a lot of blues, violets, greens and greys in that old barnwood, but I needed to push back the barn wood a bit more with darker values. 

So I used a cobalt blue wash over the whole barn wood and base to push it back.  For some reason, I cannot get the darker blue to show correctly, no matter how I fiddle with the white balance on the camera or the hue balance on the photo program.  It's a darker blue than this but I'm done trying to get it just right.