Driving To Badlands National Park, South Dakota           May 24, 2013

This morning we were camped at Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park.  It was very cold and so we didn’t waste any time packing up.  We still had a little more to see before heading east to South Dakota.

Our first stop driving along the Grand Loop was Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River heading towards the north east entrance.  It was near Tower Fall that we spotted the bear that I illustrated above.

The bear was on a mission to go some where and so I have tried to give this picture a sense of movement by using line, brush stroke and rhythm.

The watercolor painting of Upper Falls, Yellowstone River was a study done with only red, yellow and blue.  Mixing all of your colors from just three colors is a little more work but the resulting picture will have more harmony.  I am starting to paint more with a limited palette as I feel that this will improve my work.

As we headed east on Hwy 90 into Badlands National Park the landscape changed to this exotic mix of grass land with sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires.  The cattle grazing in this landscape make for an interesting composition in the third picture.  I added black pen to this watercolor as I felt the picture needed something to help with the starkness of the black cattle.