Today’s watercolor experiment:

One of my goals in this graffiti series is to make two-dozen paintings in portrait format and another two dozen in landscape format. In my days photographing graffiti in New York City, where I lived for more than two decades, I used the horizontal (landscape) format much more often than portrait. I have already painted more than a dozen graffiti watercolor sketches in vertical format and reached my goal of 24 in the horizontal orientation.

That being said, I am searching through my archives for interesting photos not just photos of a certain format.

I found one today that is a perfect candidate for a vertically-oriented graffiti sketch. I know the street address of the door I immortalized on film, but no other spatial information. Temporally, I know I took the picture on October 12, 1991, the 12th exposure of the 81st roll of film I shot that year.

I tried to reproduce the luminescence of the original photograph. I was able to achieve the same general look as my reference, but didn’t quite capture of the quality of the light.

Green Door Graffiti
6″x4″ 140# Mixed Media Paper

I used a combination of greens, beginning with aureolin washed with peacock blue. This failed to convey the olive-green feeling I got from the photo. So I tried olive green, which seemed to work. Holbein has a pigment called ‘shadow green’, which I used for the shadows (oddly enough).  I used vermillion ink to color 83% of the the street numbers, which repeat no less than six times. Also, I used a combination of white ink and gouache for the white graffiti.

Here is the reference photo:

Green Door Graffiti – Reference Photo

Perhaps in my next attempt at this composition I will use masking fluid to save the white spaces and use more layers of color to achieve the same glow one sees in the photo.