I have been trying to work with thin washes to lay in color, moving into negative painting – such as around the birch trees – and building the painting from there. I used different color mixtures to suggest the birch’s black areas on the trunk, and then used the darkest color I could mix to create some outlines for the trunks.
Watercolor is such an unpredictable, but somewhat predictable, medium that it can drive you crazy and fill you with delight.
11×15 CP Kilimanjaro 300# paper.
And there was lux!
These are LED lamps on the table which sits in front of the studio window. Ortho Plus 80 again! I do like this film!
Looking through a window on a rainy day – everything is blurry and grey, colors merge and blend into an abstraction . . .
I’ve been doing a bit of reading . . . the gist of which is work light to dark, then general to detailed, and the last is more important than the first. It is from Tom Hoffman’s excellent book on watercolor, should you wish to know.
Anyhoooo, following this advice, I made a foray into a rather abstract painting. The corner of my house has two windows, set perpendicular to one another, and are furnished with plantation shutters – wooden shutters with wide slats. This is from a photo I took. I tried to catch the graphic lines of the shutters in contrast to the curves of the fig tree and its autumnal leaves outside, next to the sidewalk and street.
“The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world.”— Dan Wells, Partials
Ink, Yarn & Beer 