Blog

Day 17

Paper: Moleskin Watercolor Journal

Paints: Windsor Newton 12 piece half pan.

For the next few days I am going to post a series of paintings I call “ ‘scuse me while I paint these skies,” and yes, you can sing that phrase to the Hendrix song.

Painting skies and clouds come easily to me in pastel and oil.  In watercolor I have been having trouble with the edge work and with getting the graduation in color that is so important in creating the illusion of the dome of the sky.  Why get frustrated with larger work when I can figure out some of my issues by doing lots of tiny studies.  So I am painting a series of very small skies from my memory and based on some of my other paintings.  With these studies I also hope to become more familiar with the tinting strength of my half pan set and with the paper in the Moleskin watercolor book.  Once I become more confident with the paints, paper, and brushwork I can apply the lessons to larger work.

The first one is a blue sky day with fluffy blue.  I covered the sky with clear water reserving the white of the paper for the tops of the clouds.  I washed in cobalt at the top then gradually added cerulean as I went downward towards the ground with a final thin wash of lemon yellow right at the horizon.  I went back to the bottom of the clouds with a mixture of cadmium red and cerulean blue which made a lovely purple-ish neutral.  The final light was added by adding a very light wash of lemon yellow into the white of the clouds along the edge of the neutral tone.  The ground was washed in with ultramarine blue and yellow ocher.  A final wash of cadmium yellow was laid on top of the foreground to give a feeling of sunlight.

What I learned:

Cobalt is a wonderful color for the top of a sky.

Cerulean is a great color for the sky as it heads towards the horizon.

When you paint from your memory there is no pressure to make the painting look like “something.”  I spent the time thinking of a lovely summer’s day and kept manipulating the washes and shapes until it looked how I wanted it to.  Not a bad way to spend a winter’s morning in Michigan.