Over the past few days I have been really working with the colors of my watercolors.  Today is a little different. As I was coming back into the house from the porch, I saw this brownish lump underneath our porch light. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was a moth. It must have been taking a rest from its incessant flapping and flopping dance it performed during the night.

It did look brown from a distance, but when I got up close, there were some very interesting patterns. They were almost the same tone, which accounted for its overall brown look. But I really liked the fluted ends of its wings.

I decided that this should be

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Process:

The symmetry and geometric patterns in the wings prompted me to get out my T-square, and triangles; also my French curves, which I hardly ever use.  I spent a significant amount of time approximating the patterns and making sure that nothing was off center.  The symmetry of the actual moth wings was not absolute, however. That was fortunate, because after a while, I did not preserve much symmetry at all.

I began with the dark spots on the edges of the wings and in the middle (tail feathers?). I used Van Dyke brown. The next most inner row of markings were a little lighter in tone. I mixed the brown with titanium white to color this area, but it didn’t look right. I ended up with a mixture of yellow ochre, white and Van Dyke brown for the lighter areas.

There was a lot of white, powdery-looking area below the dark brown markings (painted with undiluted Van Dyke brown).  My approach to this problem was to wash the wings with yellow ochre, darken the browns that the wash covered over and use an opaque white whiten the areas that were supposed to look powdery.  I used a water-soluble white oil paint as my opaque white.

I painted the area of this painting that is not wing with buff titanium. This accentuates the white of the paper just below the dark spots on the edge of the wing.

Comment:

I had high hopes for this composition, but it did not come out as planned. Here is where I think I could have improved: 1) emphasize the longitudinal lines that make up each section of the wing. The overall brown patterns on the wings alternate: some of them portray arches that begin on one end of the wing section and terminate on the other while other arch patterns begin in the middle of a wing section, cross to another, and terminate in the middle of that section. 2) explore other color mixtures. I should have done some pre-painting studies with the browns I currently have, to see how they mix with white and with each other.

I will have other opportunities to do this. If you notice, the edges of the wings are only one of the numerous patterns exhibited on the back of this ordinary brown moth.