On my lunch break today, I wandered around the parking lot and found this interesting rock. This may not seem like a big deal, but I haven’t had a lunch break in a really long time. A lunch break from work, that is. I won’t get into my long search for work since moving to the California, but suffice it to say, it was a long search. It’s good to be working.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Back to the rock. The bright sunlight and subtle shadowing across the grainy surface compelled me to snap a photo. I wondered how I could portray this in watercolors.  Here is my photo:

Process:

I drew a quick pencil outline and a few of the crags.  I decided that the buff titanium and quinacridone nickel pigments were very close to the colors in the photo.

The quinacridone is a reddish tint. I washed it into the rusty-looking areas. The buff pigment, along with some yellow ochre matched some of the shading of the sunlit rock.

I used other pigments for the shadows: neutral tint, ivory black and Van Dyke brown, which I applied depending on the opacity of the shadow and the underlying color of the rock.

After I created my patchwork, I needed to unify them somehow. In other studies usually do this with a wash of a transparent pigment of similar hue to the underlying colors. I used Payne’s gray in today’s composition. I didn’t know if this semitransparent color would work.  It did unify the disparate patches but at the same time, it reduced the range of tonal values, lowering the overall contrast of the composition. I used an old, retired toothbrush to spritz some of the quinacridone nickel onto the paper. I did this to portray the texture of the rock.

After I finished the rock, I used cerulean blue to paint the sky.

Rock
6″x6″ Watercolor Pad

Comment:

I did not include any reference object to give a clue to its size, but it is a big rock. Perhaps I should have painted in the trees in the background. However, without them the composition stands as an abstract study. Perhaps more detailing of the texture would make this study more interesting as a rock. The outline of the large mass of brown, red and gray colors and the arrangement of its shadows are the important pictorial elements in this study.

I like this composition.