Painting Vacation to Savannah!

Just returned from 6 nights in Savannah with a couple painting friends. We rented a house and it was a great home base for all our adventures! I'm still processing the whole trip and instead of posting a recap of the whole thing, I've decided to just post my paintings from the trip. My friend was kind enough to haul our art gear in her car (she was staying a whole month), while two of us flew down/back with just our clothes. I brought home my three pastel paintings in my suitcase, but the following little painting is still on its way home.

My first painting was a quick watercolor/marker painting using my homemade sketchbook easel. I'm still not comfortable with watercolors, but in the end, I liked the little painting shown on the left. The original is still in my art supplies making their way back to Ohio via car.

 We walked to Columbia Square and I tried to capture the Live Oak.

 My little set.up

Sketch on right, and watercolor/marker painting on left on Arches.

Then we drove out to Tybee Island. It's a small strip of land out in the Atlantic with little hotels and lots of souvenir shops, and a beautiful beach. It was a hopping place on a weekday because of two film crews setting up gear for shooting a series on TV called Rectify for its 3rd season and also Dirty Grandpa, starring Robert De Niro and Zac Efron. We missed out on the action though, as that was happening the next day.

We setup to paint in a covered gazebo, as all of us are very fair skinned! It was a great place to paint. I worked in pastel on 500 grit UArt the rest of the trip.

My favorite painting of the trip.

The next outing we drove to Hilton Head and visited the Red Piano Gallery. This gallery has numerous well known artists and I wanted to see their work in person. It was great. The owner gave a recommendation to eat lunch at Charlie's L'etoile Verte restaurant. It was fabulous. We had She Crab soup and curried chicken salad.

The gallery owner also gave us directions to the Honey Horn Plantation to find true southern marsh scenes. What a great place, we could have easily spent a whole day or two there with many great vistas to paint of marshes, the plantation house, and trees. We were happily surprised to find an exhibit in the museum of the Lowcountry Plein Air painters! And a great surprise was to find several plein air paintings by an artist that had the same name as my maiden name! Our styles are not similar, fortunately!

Again, we found a nice covered pavilion out at the end of a boardwalk to paint in the shade. It is very difficult to capture the subtle colors of the marsh, and also hard to paint under shade looking at such a bright scene.

The last location we painted was at Reynolds Square in Savannah beside the Old Pink House restaurant. I painted the Live Oak with the Resurrection Moss on it's limbs. Paintings and photos do not capture the beauty of these trees that are in all the squares in Savannah.

It was a wonderful vacation and we did miles of walking the historic district of Savannah. And we also visited a HUGE Blicks Art store a half block from the house many, many times. You can never have too many art supplies! We also frequented the historic Leopold's Ice Cream shop just down the street!