Artist Studio
This painting is from an image of a really cold February morning at a farm in Upperville, VA. I was out walking before sunrise and was struck by the absolute still frozen air and the spectacular colors of a winter sunrise. I tried to capture the light that sort of floats on the darkness as
I want to go over several paintings where I have used the white paper as the foil to make the darker values more interesting. Remember that in transparent watercolor the white paper is the most powerful part of the painting. Learning to design your paintings with this in mind will help you move in the direction of expressive, creative and focused paintings. Leaving random whites in areas of the painting without regard to their impact will diminish your chances of success.
I am not sold on the main cow in the front but at least it doesn’t look like an anteater.
15 x 22 watercolor on 300lb Arches cold press. Today, I am back in the mountains again, and this demonstration is pretty similar in colors to the one a few days ago. I am really trying to push the mountains way back in the painting by having everything in front of them be darker richer and for the most part warmer. I layered the colors on the mountain ridges to get a nice feeling of overlap and I do think it works pretty well. The field in the foreground has a repeat of all of the colors in the mountains, but it is just really heavy on the warm tones. When painting snow capped mountains go pretty slow and make sure to soften a few edges on the dark shadow areas. The shadows are painted with cobalt blue, burnt sienna, and cobalt violet and I painted with an 8 round, each mark is important but treat them with a variety of edges, hard, soft and textured.