Today’s watercolor experiment:

I have been looking through my archived photos of New York City street scenes. Most of them qualify for membership in my graffiti series.  Today’s snapshot, like yesterday‘s, pictures graffiti on a corner of a building. One wall of the corner building is decorated with series of ripped up posters; the other corner is a gated storefront with graffiti visible through the open grate and some on the baseboard.

My challenge was to represent the distressed nature of poster-laden wall. I used several different media besides watercolor: white gouache, ink and white conte crayon. I also used a sponge to apply a textured wash to make the surface look like posters were ripped from it.

Graffiti and Posters
6″x4″ 140# Mixed Media Paper

To represent the chain-mail gate, I began by painting brown dashes with the same repetition pattern that I use for a brick wall. I then painted the vertical members of the gate with vertical strokes of silver paint. This combination represented the shuttered storefront very well.

Graffiti and Posters – Reference Photo

The only modification I would make to my watercolor sketch would be to darken the interstitial spaces between the silver chain links. I would not change the brightness of the rest of that plane of the corner.

I remember, it was a beautiful, bright day.