Springtime in Baltimore

My morning of full of successes, and I'm please to announce that I have a third success to add to my day, this afternoon. The success here isn't so much in the painting itself, but in the fact that it actually got completed, finally. This painting (my second one of Jason) sat on my easel ALL summer. When I came back to finish it, I forgot what I was doing. That's why you don't let paintings sit for that long. The background and sky tripped me up, so when I got it back out, I just painted over the background and started over. Ofcourse, I can't compare it to what it looked like before, but it might look exactly the same.
Having stopped this painting in the middle of not being able to get the sky quite right, I was stuck thinking about the sky all summer long. That's not really a bad thing, because I've noticed a lot of things in the sky lately... a lot of clouds. When I was in college and taking a meteorology course, my roommate and I would sit on our front porch and talk endlessly about the clouds- putting our meteorology terminology to good use (what? Isn't that what you did in college?). There really is this whole other world up there in the sky- with gigantic otherworldly creatures called clouds. All summer, each time I would step outside, I would imagine that the sky was actually a 2 dimensional backdrop, like the kind they use at a photography place (or like the one in the movie The Truman Show). And then I would imagine that the clouds were alive- some are monstrous and some are cute. The closer the cloud is to the horizon, the smaller it is... that's an important thing to know when you want to paint them. And while just looking up at them is pretty fascinating, I think it would be even cooler to go on a hot air balloon ride through them. I don't have a bucket list, but if I DID, I would have going on a hot air balloon ride on my bucket list.
And when I look at the sky, this song always comes to my head. So, as you can imagine, this song has been coming to my head a lot- just about any time I'm outside during the day, this song is in my head:



Anyways... none of this talk has anything really to do with the painting... I mean except for the sky. But the painting is supposed to be about springtime in Baltimore- where Jason lives. You can tell it is springtime because of the color that comes alive in the spring. I may be remembering my time in Baltimore a little more colorfully than it actually was... that's what memories (and paintings of memories) are for.