My husband and I recently spent 8 days in Paris and we were blessed with blue skies and perfect temperatures every day. Spring is a beautiful time to be here!! Painting Pont Royal in Paris was just one painting from this dream trip.
My husband gave me a rolling red backpack for my last birthday so I was able to pack everything in that (except my tripod) and find a couple of good spots to paint while we were there. All three spots I found were walking distance from our hotel so I could just roll my supplies to the location I chose.
I had so much fun. I found a great spot next to the River Seine which I thought would be fairly quiet, but you can see from the little video below there were a lot of people walking by. Many stopped to talk and comment on my painting. Many took my picture (!).
I can see in the video that I wasn’t wearing my headphones, that must have been because I didn’t think this would be a busy spot. When I’m in a busy area my trick is to wear headphones to deter people from talking to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to talk to interested people but every time someone talks to me it’s a distraction. And I only have a certain amount of time to paint before the light and shadows have changed.
So this is the Pont Royal and in the background is a part of the Louvre. I did say we had blue skies and actually didn’t see a cloud the whole time we were there, those clouds in my painting were added just because I felt like the painting needed them.
I had recently bought some 12″x16″ canvases and at the last minute decided to pack them for the trip. I’m just getting used to painting that large back home in Texas so it was a leap to pack them. And when I was in Paris I thought I must have been crazy, but I went ahead and used them since I had brought them. I think using the larger canvases pushed me a bit and it was good for me.
So many distractions! Besides all the people walking by, a tour boat went by every 5 minutes. The tour guides were always talking about the Louvre as the boats went by since it was right there so throughout the morning I heard little bits of history, “opened as a museum in 1793”, “8.8 million annual visitors”, “built in the 12th Century”, along with “Revolution”, “destruction”, and “Mona Lisa”. But mostly I was concentrating on my painting of Pont Royal.
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