Author: -N-

WWM #3: Picnic Food

The third prompt for #WorldWatercolorMonth!  Here, picnic food.  Bread, wine, cheese, fruit.  Sounds a lot more healthy than burgers and fries, and certainly more attractive to paint!  But, oh, what a challenge gouache is compared with watercolor.  I haven’t worked in opaque medium in years and years and years.  Personally, I don’t like the picnic basket, but the cheese, bread, wine, and (sorta) the fruit look okay.

I started with broad swaths of the major colors, such as the green, browns, blues, and laid in the underlying colors for the bread, cheese and apples.  From there I moved into less thin paint to thicker, working from the most distant (the grass) to the foreground.  At the end, I laid a thin wash of ultramarine blue to dissolve a bit of the underlying gouache to create shadows, knowing full well it would lift and blur the paint underneath it.

While I cannot say I love the painting – still lives are not things I pursue, preferring landscapes – I can say that it was definitely a worthwhile study.  Paint handling is getting a bit more intuitive and logical.  So different than watercolor – but at the same time comprehensible, if that makes any sense.  It’s really just understanding the logistics of the medium . . . And, I think I am improving (a bit) in using gouache, which is a good feeling.  I’m looking forward to the challenge of alternating transparent with opaque medium during #WorldWatercolorMonth.

WWM #2: Sunny Sky

I truly love scenes of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and Southern California – places where the sun is brilliant, walls are white, shadows are blue and glowing, palm trees clack in the wind, and bougainvillea brightens the day with shades of mauve or pink or salmon.

Two people come to mind when I think of painting such scenes – classically, Winslow Homer, and more in our own era, the recently passed Charles Reid.  Both men caught the flavor of such scenes, and I hope I did here, too.  The beauty of the Caribbean cannot be denied and its sunny days are memorable for their clarity and stunning colors of sky, sea, and land.