A Spring Walk, 12″ x 16″, UART 320 board

Watercolor underpainting

Laying in value shapes

I decided to do another high horizon watercolor underpainting picture from a photo taken years ago.  I envisioned doing something similar to what I did witht the Rock Creek bridge painting. I really loved the white house in the woods, the arc of the reddish bridge, and the saturated patch of yellow flowers.

I succeeded in keeping the background fairly suggestive, but the rest of my idea didn’t work.  I spent a lot of time on the underpainting, going back over it many times. But it was still light AND I didn’t have a good sense of the compostion. I ended up using a violet to block in areas of dark and then had to go over them with fairly heavy applications of pastel.  But, somehow, a path developed, and I added some rocks, and I liked the final result.

Regardless of not doing what I had hoped to do, it was lovely to paint so much green now during the BROWN season!  But the green will be here soon enough.