This morning, the weather report promised rain within an hour. The clouds looked ho-hum from my patio and the fog was burning off, but I took a chance and threw my painting supplies into the car. Within 20 minutes — when I arrived at Bush Park — I was glad that I did.

The ground fog was just beginning to rise at Bush Park, and the sun started tinting the clouds a more magenta tone near the horizon. The colors were very muted, but the scene was still more about color than about tone (light and dark).

Immediately, I took a series of photos to use as references, later. Then, I scrambled to set up my easel before the scene changed to something better suited to painting. I wanted to be ready when the sun added richer colors to the landscape.

I started by scrubbing in some green in the foreground and the darkest areas of the blue sky. As I was tweaking those colors, the sun started to emerge through the clouds. From that point on, it was a race to capture the colors while the ground fog remained.

That’s the tricky part with this kind of painting: Portraying the rapidly changing light (and, this morning, fog) so that it’s a single moment in time… not the sky at one phase, the background at another, and the foreground at a different point altogether.

I’d paint the colors as I saw them, and then use a soft, dry brush to blend the colors at the horizon. Then I’d tweak the colors and values, and blend again.

I’m not entirely happy with the sky yet, and I’m definitely going to use a dry brush to correct a few of the strokes. I may tweak the background a bit as well, but this will be just two or three minutes’ work; the original plein air sketch took about an hour.

By painting in the same location repeatedly, I feel that my work is improving. Instead of analyzing a fresh setting, I can focus on light, shadow, color and contrast.

This study offers less of the dramatic contrast than my paintings usually do, but I learned a lot from the apparent simplicity of this landscape.