Posts Tagged ‘stream’
Summer Work
A quick browse through my galleries will make it obvious that light on trees, especially on the trunks of the trees, is a favorite theme and subject.Many times, my studio paintings begin with an older sketch, developed through a series of thumbnails, often followed by a color study or two. This latest work began quickly from an old thumbnail sketch. The thumbnail indicated a deep forest and meandering creek, with bright sunlight streaming in from the left of the picture plane.
Rather than working out the composition with thumbnails and studies, I decided to jump right in. I sketched out the composition on a half sheet of stretched watercolor paper and worked with a wet-in-wet background.
“Glow Woods”
13″h x 20″w
Unframed
$520
The initial underpainting was developed with layers of paint applied directly in successive layers. One of the greatest challenges of working in watercolor is in creating rich darks without creating “mud” or muddy passages. In this work, the deep foreground darks were developed by layering glazes over the background and over each other, but only after each successive glaze had completely dried – becoming “bone” dry, as I often tell my students.
The resulting painting worked well enough. The contrast of the highly reflective stream with the dark shadowed forest along with the tree trunks that seem to glow with inner light create a bit of a fantasy look to these summer woods.
