The muse must be on summer break.  There’s no other way to explain the dearth of inspiration. However at times like these, I have a go-to fallback position: paint or draw my workspace. Why just sit there and strain, when I could just practice painting what I see?

Today’s experiment:

After thumbing through some watercolor magazines, I thought I would try to use make use of the properties of the watercolors. Unlike some of my previous studies (Lower East Side, Another Vintage Watercolor, Vintage Fig Tree) which were more like colored-in pen and ink drawings, I wanted to be more suggestive. For instance, instead of drawing in the details of a book, I was hoping to be able to portray it though thoughtfully-placed patches of paint.

Here is today’s watercolor sketch:

Aside from the unintelligible scribbles on the yellow box and some black-painted outlines, I pretty much held to my original idea.

I also wanted this study to be bold. Many of my other studies (Vintage Photograph and New Watercolor, A Coven of Dragonfruit, Moving On ) look more like under-paintings than finished work. So I tried a series of glazes. First, I used Prussian Blue for the shadows on the throw rug. I established the stripes first with Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna. After drying, I used Lemon Yellow to glaze the throw rug shape. I’m afraid that the shadows got a little muddy.

I should probably have glazed other areas of the study, but with the muses on vacation, I figured I’d quit while I’m ahead.