Little Creek – Watercolor

From a photo of a nearby creek in a local park. Not a great watercolor but perhaps a bit more solid than the ones I have done earlier this week. The fact is, once you don’t make painting a daily practice and let it slide by, you really need to get warmed up to do it yet again! I’ve been far too busy with other things, and it shows . . .

Little Creek – Photograph

Little Creek Amongst the Trees

A bit of nature in the land of suburbia.

Actually, this is just one part of a creek which runs throughout my neighborhood and into the open space a few miles away. Rain water washes into the creek from gutters, and you can find breeding ducks and frogs in its water. I have even seen an egret there. After our rains, we have a fair bit of water in it, and I enjoy walking a few blocks to the park, just to hear its trickle and see kids and dogs having a bit of a riot.

Greens Against the Sky – 3

I am having a lot of fun, despite frustrations, with this repeated subject for a watercolor. Today was bit more thought out, and the focus was just planes of washes to create depth, dimension, or at least some attempt at it. I think I am seeing this more and more as an abstract as I work on it – planes of color to suggest the trees along the base of the headland. I dropped a blob of color on the hill that wasn’t in the previous two, and tried to do a bit of a save, but not really successfully. Ah, the joy of watercolor!

Greens Against the Sky – 2

I was not especially pleased with yesterday’s painting. After leaving it alone, looking at it again, it seemed to have all the same values for the most part. Today I decided to look at shapes and values a bit more in depth.

One thing I did was to change the elements of the picture a bit. I cropped off a lot of the left side and then made a composition out of that. Left side, middle value sky against light land and dark trees. Right side, darker land against lighter sky. In the middle, land and sky of similar value, mainly middle.

Obviously, the right becomes darker, and what I attempted to do was to create a shape of dark values with connections throughout the painting, connecting with right side to bottom and then to the left. Darks were connected throughout with the stone walls and into the trees. The dark trees in the upper left shift into a darker middle value with the sky.

I also tried to work with shapes – dark shapes with the middle ground tree being the focal point. The lighter shape is the land and the slope down the hill from the same tree. I have been reading a bit about how to work values to create focus – such as light and middle values as focal points surrounded by dark. The same can be light and dark to focus, and then surround that by middle values. Maybe that is what I was doing with the tree and shadow on the hilltop.

Anyway, my head is spinning. I know what I was trying to accomplish – shapes, values, warm and cool colors. Words are not easy to find to describe, so I will leave you for now with my mental and painterly chaos!