Poplars on the Mississippi River Sandbar

This painting was created on a cloudy Sunday morning en plein air (a fancy French way of saying outside, bugs and all) near the shore of the Mississippi River, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I love gray day. Gray days are wonderful for plein air painting — the light doesn’t change nearly as quickly as it does on a sunny day. There is also something magical that happens to colors on a gray day — thing feel a bit warmer and slightly more saturated.