20 inches by 30 inches. Watercolor and Colored pencil on Rives Printmaking Paper.
These projects are inspired by the anniversary trip my wife and I took to Acadia National Park, Maine.
During the beginning stage of this project, one of the things I wanted to discovery was how well I could use my portable watercolor palette. I wanted to make a system of color recipes that I could use as quick access points for the paintings. This reduces the time of guess-work to find the color you are looking for as you reference various images.
Being able to identify various visual problems ahead of time is key when making projects. Working on these problems in an approachable and accessible way, like preliminary studies is invaluable. These are usually much smaller in scale as to work through quickly. Value studies, working with black/white/greyscale will help you understand where light sources are coming from as well as figuring out what needs more/less definition in the work. Color studies can aid in figuring out what items can be grouped together, as well as potentially adding enhancing mood to the subjects.
WIP of Ocean Path. If there was anything that I learned from this project, is that scale does change the way that you approach projects. I normally don't work at this scale and it was fun to expand my experience in this way.
WIP of Sandy Beach. Coming off of the momentum of the previous project, I felt like I was able to speed through a lot of progress in fewer sessions. On this project, while I didn't work on a value study, I did work on a color study. The color study gave me clarity on what sort of visual problems I could encounter with the new subject. Since I had established my color recipes, in the color study I was able to quickly get a rough idea of what color mixtures I would need for the new project.
The challenge for Sandy Beach was more about the temperature of the color mixtures and how they interact with each other. The brush textures and directionality played a part in solving some areas, in particular the forest and sand portions.
Finals for Ocean Path & Sandy Beach.