Feb 3, 2012 - Silk Road Bridge Bennington
Silk Road Covered Bridge, Bennington, VT. Like most winter days in VT, it was “cloudy with breaks of sun” as the forecasters like to say. When I sat down to paint, there was sun light hitting the left – south – side of the bridge and some of it was passing through the lattice structure and landing on the white door casing on the interior right. By the time the drawing was done, the sun was pretty much gone. I left the sun & shadow pattern on the inside of the doorway never-the-less. The finished sketch is about “9 x 12″ and done in a D’Arches 140lb CP watercolor paint book.
Winter colors dominate this sketch, just like they do in the previous two – Feb 1 & Feb 2, 2012. It is a challenge to create enough variety in the grays and other low intensity earth colors to keep shapes from merging with one another too much. The grays in this sketch are mixed from either ultramarine or cobalt blue with burnt sienna, raw sienna or Quinacridone burnt scarlet. Using these five pigments in varying combinations creates a nice variety of color and value which gives the sketch the look of winter without being too somber.
This can’t really be described as a “wet-into-wet” watercolor painting, and yet the technique is used in a number of places – especially in creating the look of distant forest without much fuss. Beyond the distant trees in the background, it is also used on the foreground right roadway, the sky and in laying in the initial rusty, violety (if there is such a word) red on the covered bridge itself.
If there truly are trends that take hold, become popular and then eventually give way in watercolor, I would have to say that ultra, macro realism is the current look and technique for watercolor painting. All the big national and regional watercolor exhibits seem to have more every year. Sometime that doesn’t leave much room for those of us still painting in “older”, less trendy styles and techniques. I tend not be a follower, so will continue working in the style and with the techniques that produce what I like to describe as “representational impressionism” seen in most of my work.
In the classes that I teach, I have noticed my students having two very different reactions to the wet-into-wet watercolor technique. They love the look it produces, but seem to feel nothing but frustration when trying it themselves. By popular request and in response to both of these reactions, I have put together a new class called Wet-in-Wet Watercolor and will be offering it for the first time in just a couple of weeks. The class will teach the basics of the technique along with several skills needed to handle wet-into-wet watercolor without, or at least with less, frustration. Not only will the class teach the skills but is guaranteed to loosen up the work of anyone using them. More info on the Wet-in-Wet Watercolor class can be found by clicking here.
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