Blue Skies

Watercolor lends itself particularly well to landscapes. Fields blend into mountains which fade into skies so effortlessly (at least when the instructor does it). The trick I learned last time I took a class is that mountains in the distance are bluer-grayer and the fields in the foreground are yellower, greener. Use the same basic palette of colors to pull it all together and you end up with a nice alpine scene approaching something used as a backdrop for the Sound of Music. But what if you want your painting to actually look like a real place, like somewhere you went camping and took a photogaph and brought home to paint? That takes a little more skill. The instructor will say don't think about drawing a cloud, think about a shape sky and put the blue on the paper, don't think about the crevice in a mountain see it as a shape of darkness. It's hard to drop the picture you have in your mind of just what that cloud should look like and let it form itself in the spaces devoid of blue. Last night I studied my picture, wet the paper, dipped my brush in some Prussian Blue and went at it just putting in some blue here and there, a spot of gray now and then and let the paint and water do its thing. And it worked! I ended up with a beautiful blue sky marked with soft streaks of cloud (except where water dripped on it and I tried to fix it and made a mess - don't ever try to fix things). The mountains with the snow and crevices I'm still working on. But I'm starting to understand how to see an area of color without seeing the big picture. For me seeing light and color takes a lot of work and it's not lost on me that for some people this comes much more naturally. And what a different world they must see.