On the first day of our stay in Solvang, we went on a wine tasting / painting "crawl," to three wineries in the Santa Ynez Valley. We didn't have a lot of time to paint at each location, so after messing up a painting at the first place, I re-thought my methods, and at the second winery I decided to do a finished sketch to come back and paint later, and took a photo or two to remind me of colors. Since I was using my Droid as a camera, the colors weren't the greatest on this one (though some of my pictures came out better), but it was enough to remind me of the things I liked about it--the house, the stripes of the grape arbors, the perspective from far away to close up.
I also wrote the colors directly into the drawing, erasing as I painted, but on Tuesday morning back in the garden at our B&B, where I actually painted the picture, I forgot to remove a few; if you look really closely, you can find the word "purple" embedded in the mountains.
It was Theresa's suggestion to us to do the close-up of the grapes at the side of our paintings and use that as a framework, and it reminded me that painting isn't just about duplicating what you see, it's also about design and layout and the thought processes leading up to making something more. Other people on Every Day Matters have also illustrated that, with their borders through which parts of their paintings intrude, and I love the effect. Thanks, everyone!
This is my last post for my watercolor trip (although I have some photos that I hope to use to paint more scenes from it). It was great--I would encourage others to take one. What a wonderful treat to sit outdoors all day long and capture color on paper.
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