As I was having my coffee this morning, I thought I would get back to sketching. I haven’t done that in a while.  I like the mornings. They are quiet, and the fig trees provide endless fascination through their ability to attract all kinds of bird life… and squirrels. The other morning, a humming bird came within three feet of me, hovering and singing its clicking song. We looked directly at each other. She looked me over from three different hovering places before she took off. During those 30 seconds or so, I clicked back to her as she clicked to me. It was a great feeling of communication.

At any rate, here is my pencil sketch of the back porch:

Today’s watercolor experiment:

The whiteness of the plastic chair at the center of the frame is the detail that inspired me to draw the scene. I’ve always found it very difficult to draw gleaming surfaces. The gleam is the whiteness of the paper, which means everything that is not ‘gleam’ needs to be lowered in tone by the pencil. It is not evident from the above sketch that there was a large range of tonal values   in the chair alone.

Back inside the house, where I paint, I decided to replicate my sketch in watercolor. I began by using latex resist to preserve the whiteness of the chair, and also to define the fence in the foreground.

Almost immediately, I realized that the outline of the chair was too small for the picture frame. I thought of vignetting the scene by darkening the corners for a keyhole peek at the same scene I sketched in pencil, but I decided against it.

I painted the solid fence (van Dyke brown, nickel quinacridone gold, burnt umber) , in the background and laid in a wash for the sky (Peacock blue, followed by Neutral tint, followed by Prussian blue).

At some point, I decided that it was not important to replicate the composition of my sketch, so I placed Arthur, my pet avocado tree in the foreground on the right, and painted the planks of the deck, even though they were minimally visible in the pencil rendition.

I painted the fig leaves in two stages (Hooker’s green, Shadow green): applying some of the green pigment prior to drying and some after the paper was totally dry.

The white chair is still the center of attention of this piece, however the painting does not resemble the sketch very much at all.

Lost in translation? Perhaps. Although each rendition says something different about the back porch.