Today’s watercolor experiment;

The idea in my mind today was to compose a recognizable scene using knowledge I gained during the past few days of painting abstract studies (Let Watercolors Be Watercolors, About Those Watercolors, Yet Another Factor, Red Abstract).

Process:

I remember a painting I did a few months ago in which I drew my paintbrush across a wetted paper to create a tree-line-looking effect. I remembered that any stroke across soaking wet paper tends to result in a symmetric blooming of paint. I only wanted the top half of the bloom today, so I divided the plane of my paper with masking tape, wet the area above it and brushed in Permanent Green Number 1 (Holbein).

For the second phase, I rewet the paper and painted in some Peacock blue, another Holbein pigment. I chose my other colors to represent the sunset (lemon yellow and quinacridone red) from the posts listed above. I knew how the pigments would look when mixed. As expected, I got  nice yellow-orange and red-purple transitions.

The next stage begged for more depth, so I reapplied Peacock blue over the rewet paper, added more quinacridone red and a touch more of lemon yellow to emphasize the colors. The Permanent Green # 1 was a bit too light, so I used the darker Forest Green from Sennelier, to make darker foliage in the foreground.

Unintentionally, I found a great way to represent the crowns of trees. In trying to lighten the darker areas of the Forest Green application, I touched my brush to the region near the tape. It must have had more water than pigment because the water chased the green pigment away leaving a lighter area near the tip of the brush and reticulated edges of green where the water dropped the pigment it was carrying.

In the next stage I painted in tree trunks and branches with Van Dyke Brown  and again washed the upper area with Peacock blue.

It was time to take the tape off.

I was very pleased that no colors bled underneath the tape.

I used Peacock blue again on the bottom area, but without prewetting the paper. I blotted some of the pigment from the area directly beneath the sun and applied lemon yellow and quinacridone red, trying to avoid creating a form. I wanted to blend the brighter colors into the foreground color.

I used cadmium red near the tree line to give me a dark brownish reflection from the trees, and dabbed in some tree trunks.

All that was left to do was to remove the tape.

I am pretty happy with this result. However, on my agenda now is to learn how to paint water reflections.