Today’s watercolor experiment:

Inspiration:

Joy showed me the sky this morning. There were yellows and reds on the bottom of gray clouds.

Morning Sky
Digital Phone Photo

The photo does not do this sunrise justice.

So I had my goal for today. Red and yellows to gray. Instead of starting out with my good paper, I decided to see how my different reds looked with the Payne gray. While I was at it, I tested all those same reds with cadmium yellow pale.

Gray Red Test Strip

The reds I tested were (left to right, starting on the top row): cadmium red light; cadmium red deep; Sennelier red; French vermilion; Opera rose (Sennelier); permanent red deep (MaimeriBlu); quinacridone red; cadmium red; Winsor red deep; Opera rose (Winsor Newton) and permanent alizarin crimson.

From the test, I thought that Opera rose would lend a nice pinkish tone that one sees in the early morning sky.

That was the plan.

Process:

I started at the top, as I usually do. As yesterday, I wanted the top part of the sky to be a reddish blue. I soaked the paper and began with cobalt blue. I added French ultramarine which is delightfully reddish. I used a lot of water and did a lot of blotting. I also decided to try the permanent red deep, and dropped some into the blue area.

As per my plan, I laid down some Opera rose and the cadmium yellow pale. It did not look very good.

Crazy Sky First Stage

Proceeding from stage I, I added Winsor blue (red shade) at the top of the picture plane. I liked the graininess of the blue and red area, but the red-yellow mix was not satisfying.

I thought I could fix the red-yellow mixing problem, so at this point I dropped in some Payne’s gray. The rest of my painting process consisted of blotting and dripping paint and water in different measures.

To solve the red-yellow problem I decided to use gamboge, one of my favorite yellows, although heavily tinted to the orange side.

To finish off at the bottom of the study, I used Van Dyke brown to once again depict receding hilly terrain.

Below is the finished study:

This Sky’s Crazy
9″x12″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

Comment:

Although I wasn’t able to capture this morning’s sunrise colors, I am pleased with the results. The testing I did before painting didn’t seem to do much good, but it did give me a little fore-knowledge of what to expect. I learned more when I was in painting mode.

Right now it seems as if I am wrestling with the watercolors. Hopefully this will turn into more of a collaboration. (Thank you Carol, for that thought.)