It was a dark and stormy afternoon…

I don’t have a title for this painting yet, but I think “Dark and Stormy Night” is taken, by Snoopy. The painting is from a day we were up on the Grand Mesa when a major summer thunderstorm moved in. It rained so hard so fast that on the way back I had to get out of the car and walk across an area of the dirt road that had water running across it. We couldn’t tell how deep the water was or if the road was being washed out yet, so I forged the stream ahead of the car. Brought back some glory days from the farm! Anyway, the clouds were fascinating.

This is a watercolor on 300# Canson. You can see in the first pic that I have a few of the bright whites masked out with masking tape (gives a nice torn edge as opposed to masking fluid.) The first step after masking, which I did not get a photo of, was to lay in a fairly flat solid wash of French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna (one of my favorite landscape neutrals.) When this field was still wet but just with a light sheen to it (nearly dry) I dropped clear water into the wash and let it bloom. This is why I love watercolor–I could watch paint bloom all day, it’s fascinating. Anyway, I lifted the paint from the middle of the blooms, then let the whole field dry, removed the mask, and started laying in layers of paint to push the values farther and define the clouds.

The foreground was painted using wet-on-wet washes initially with a salt texture–again, I let this define where the values of the foliage would lie rather than dictating it from the beginning.

This piece reads very well close up, but is a little lost from a distance. I will sit on it for awhile and see if I need to do something more to the foreground to make it more interesting compositionally.

My thought for the day: go buy yourself a tube of watercolor paint and some cheap watercolor paper and play with paint blooms. It’s very therapeutic!

Dawn