I love painting the Iowa landscape with its old barns full of character. I improvise with the colors and design, working from my pencil sketches and reference photographs. For this piece, I used scraps of my hand-painted collage papers that I saved from work on larger pieces.These hand-painted acrylic papers are brightly colored and have lots of texture. I blend numerous colors when I paint these.

I began using a pale pink for the sky and used some geometric shapes for the roof and barn. The foreground was not planned until the last minute. I decided a cornfield would look great. I had forgotten my X-Acto knife, so I used scissors to sculpt the ragged corn stalk shapes. It was better than using the knife.