This is a view from the Washington side of the Columbia River looking east down the gorge from Hamilton Mountain. I was inspired to paint this because I liked how much distance could be seen and the elevation or vantage point from where I stood.

This view made for an interesting painting challenge too. All the color values were in the middle for the top two-thirds of the piece. All the darkest darks were in the foreground. I like this. It makes the viewer (me) want jump over the darks to get to the ‘back.’ There are three distinct bands to this piece, giving it a nice overall design.

I used phthalocyanine and ultramarine blues, manganese violet, raw umber and white for the majority of my mixtures. I worked hard at keeping the values balanced so that the banding worked.

The foreground forest is an example of controlled chaos. This is another time that I was after a certain look as opposed to trying to render every tree. The chaos was controlled by concise color mixing and application. I used Gamblin’s Indian Yellow to warm up the foreground greens to make them seem to be in the reflected light of a bright, yet cloudy day!