A cold has me moving a little slowly but today I'm painting and I thought I'd share a work in progress of a foggy morning in the Virginia Blue Ridge mountains:    

 

I've started with a pretty simple drawing with a very thin earthy mixture, using both brush and rag to indicate my general composition. In case you can't tell what this is, a fence and a pathway lead down towards the center of interest; a foggy line of trees. What I really like about the composition is the strong lines that draw me into the scene, justaposed by the softness of the hazy atmosphere. I've included some telephone poles and lines in my initial drawing because they were a part of the scene, and I liked how they echoed the other lines on the ground. They may remain...or not. I may also move that path over a little to the left or widen it a bit, but I will know more once I get further along.

For these fog paintings I find it is easier to start with the lightest values of the sky and more distant trees, building darker values as I work my way forward. As I'm going along I'm painting pretty quickly and thickly, testing  and comparing values with a palette knife of color on the canvas, as in the 2nd image. Right now I really want to keep my edges soft, so I'm using a rag quite a bit in this early stage to push paint around, blend edges and make corrections.

For this fog painting, what I have in mind is a scene with somewhat warmer hues than what I've achieved so far. Even though the fog is thick and there is a diffused light rather than a direct light source, the sun was burning through and giving everything a warm hazy glow.

The problem is that warm colors can so quickly jump out and push the distance forward, so I'll need to discover ways to deal with this. I should have a better idea of how to proceed after I block in the foreground.