The Colorado Collection: Behind the Scenes

 

Collection Release:

Friday, June 18th

If you want early access at 10am CST make sure you are on my Studio Insider email list— you can get on it here

The Colorado Collection is almost here and I’m thrilled to be sharing my creative process with you from the past 6 weeks of inspiration gathering and planning!

 
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colors

As soon as we got to Colorado I started noticing all the colors, which are very different than those in Tennessee! I pulled together this color palette to base the series on. Every painting does not have every one of these colors, but rather a smaller subset of these main colors. I make all of my color palettes into swatches on little pieces of paper because it helps me rearrange and hold different swatches next to a painting or a photo to decide which ones work best together. My design and planning process is very tactile- I like to be able to move things around.

 

places

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All of the pieces in this collection are titled after the location they were inspired by. Everywhere we have explored in Colorado, I have taken tons of reference photos to use as painting inspiration. I have hundreds (if not a thousand by now). Only a handful of them end up making the cut to be turned into paintings. Some of the places featured in this collection are:

Estes Park

Trail Ridge Road

Green Mountain

Emerald Lake

Dream Lake

Breckenridge

Golden (North Table and South Table Mountains)

Red Rocks

Wildlife Refugee Area

 

inspiration photos

A sneak peak at some of the scenes you’ll be seeing in the collection release! EEP I’m so excited!

 

planning & sketching

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The last step before taking the plunge into the actual painting— planning and sketching. I’ll admit I didn’t used to do much planning. I loved to sit down and paint whatever I felt like at that time. However, as my creative practice has grown over the past two years I’ve learned to take time, explore ideas and THEN put paintbrush to canvas (or panel or paper). The results have been a lot better, refined, thoughtful pieces.

Thanks for sharing in the journey with me and enjoying the process! Again, if you want early access to the collection you can sign up here.


Collection Release: June 18th 10am CST for Studio Insiders, 2pm for the public

Ella Anderson