Challenged Again - Virtual Paintout, Summit County, CO

6x6 inches, acrylic on watercolor paper

 Breckenridge, Colorado

It has been ages since I've participated in an online painting challenge.  One of my favorites is Bill Guffy's Virtual Paintout, which chooses a different location around the world each month and challenges people to use Google Street View to select a scene and then paint it.  He includes the paintings on his site and on Facebook.  I wanted to give this one a try for a couple reasons.  First, we finally are buried in snow after a balmy start to winter in southern Wisconsin, and I thought I should paint a snowy scene.  Next, we've actually vacationed in Breckenridge a couple times in the summer, have driven around the whole area, hiked the streets, everything except skied.

It takes a while to do these challenges, even in a small format.  I virtually drove all over Breckenridge, up in the mountains, over at Keystone and the whole area searching for a scene that grabbed me.  Then planning and actually painting took several hours.  Finally there are rules for submitting these challenges, including resizing the image to fit Guffy's requirements, something I never remember how to do from time to time.  I think I did it correctly, but I'll have to wait to see if it shows up with the other submissions.