Kettle Pond from Owls Head

This piece was painted specifically for a show featuring Vermont State Parks. I searched my own archives for suitable material and visited some sites, but in the end I was captivated by a photo taken by Adam Silverman (with his permission) of Kettle Pond taken from Owls Head. It's a fabulous view and I really wanted to try to tackle it. The challenges for this one were first the sunset, and second getting the feeling of failing light on the autumn forest, that time of day that direct light is disappearing but the sunset is still illuminating the colorful foliage. I shifted the values quite a bit while painting subsequent layers and ended up with this nice sunset painting.