Pros & Cons of Plein Air Watercolor Painting

For many years, I refused to consider adding plein air painting to my artistic practice. It wasn’t because I didn’t know what plein air painting was. (If the term en plein air is new to you, it’s used by artists to describe painting outdoors, on location.) I knew only that my plein air paintings showed the essence of my lack of skill more than the scene before me, and that didn’t seem likely to change any time soon. Why would I take a deliberate step back from the paintings I was achieving in the studio to paint indistinguishable messes of color in conditions that were often not comfortable for the artist? It’s funny, because as a young artist, there were many things that other artists did that I didn’t consider to be relevant to my own artistic journey. It seems like it wasn’t so much that I needed to be converted to their way of thinking as to recognize that maybe I misunderstood the purpose of the assignment from the beginning. You don’t have to be a plein air painter to be a good pai