Tag: France

Somewhere A Citadel

I travel the globe through watching videos, photo websites, and royalty-free images. This time I visited someplace in France, searching Pixabay for photos matching the term “citadel” and found some really interesting things. What I wanted in particular were photos with strong architectural details and perspective to use as practice for drawing / painting buildings. The one I used in the painting below was taken from a low vantage point and looking upward. The upper reaches of the tower were centered over the corner of the citadel, and the sides of the citadel sloped steeply downward.

Working from a photo is often difficult, especially if it is small on screen and cannot be enlarged. The left and right sides of the building were confusing, so I just sorta made up what they were, but the center of the building was pretty clear in the photo. I drew first with ink, then added color, and then returned to add more ink and more color a few times. The ink proved helpful in making the right side of the painting darker, as it was in the photo. I didn’t want to add a lot of paint as the purpose of ink and wash is just that – delicate touches of color to the ink drawing.

I really like working with ink for drawing buildings. It will get there some day! Right now I still struggle with both depth and perspective, but practice like this is always fun, and usually to almost always, rewarding.

Red Poppies

I always have loved vistas of wildflowers, and the red poppies seen in so many French paintings always seem wonderful to me.  Red like that is hard to find (I think) in the natural world.  Painting it is even harder.  I ended up using mostly Cadmium Red Orange.

This is another direct watercolor from this morning, but because of the multiple layers of washes, I had to let it dry in between.  I went about getting ready for work between layers.  At first, I just did a sky and put in colors of grasses and poppies – but they all bled together, so the second attempt – the one above – is the final version.  If you look at the pictures below – click on them to see them in sequence – you can see what I did.  I scanned each wash layer before doing the next.

Original Attempt