Kamas Barn

One of my favorite activities is sketching outdoors from life. A couple years ago I pretty much made it my mission to do as much sketching from life as possible. One of my favorite mediums for sketching is pen and watercolor. The combination of pen and watercolor allows you to get in all the little details and then add color washes to capture the mood and it is all very portable. Every now and then I make a sketch that's is as good as painting, this sketch is one of those cases. I enjoy going on day trips to rural areas, something about the wide open spaces, the hay bales, old barns and tractors just appeals to me, not to mention farm country tends to be much less noisy with much less traffic than down here in suburbia. I discovered this scene on one of those day trips. The old, apparently abandoned, rusty, corrugated metal barn is on the outskirts of the small town of Kamas Utah along a road Utahn's refer to as the "Mirror Lake Highway" since it leads up into the Uinta National Forest and consequently Mirror Lake, the largest lake in the High Uintas. Anyway, I had to find a perch on amongst large blocks of discarded concrete looking down on the barn scene from high up next to the highway. It wasn't the most comfortable spot but it was worth it.