A wet dry landscape

Today I attempted a landscape, and since I wanted to try painting wet-in-wet, I switched from my multimedia sketchbook paper to "real" watercolor paper (Fluid 140-lb.), because I knew the sketchbook wouldn't stand up to it. I can use quite a bit of water on this Bee paper, but it's not something you can pre-wet.

My Fluid paper is in a watercolor block, which means I can wet down the whole page without it buckling. People who paint mostly wet-in-wet would scoff at this method—Paul Jackson, my friend Colleen, others I know actually dump their paper into a bin of water and let it sit to soak through both sides for 5 to 10 minutes to make sure it's super-saturated. But since I haven't quite got the hang of this yet, I decided it would suffice to wet down the front side thoroughly.

The landscape I painted was somewhat nondescript, but what I liked about it is that it proceeded from pale distant mountains to closer ones with some discernible detail, to close-up brush and grass and road, so that you could achieve a graduated effect with the use of color, becoming more intense as you get closer in. It's also a dry landscape (Southern California, not much green on those hills for most of the year), so it's ironic to me to paint it wet to make it look dry.

Some of my machinations working wet really backfired on me, and while I was able to finesse parts of the painting to work, other parts were less successful. The far purple hills bled a little too much right away into the sky, so that I had to come back after and overwork them to give them more solidity. I put the clouds too high above the hills and left the whites in too-angular chunks, so they're not as fluffy as one would want.

On the near-distant hills, there were rows (corresponding to roads or trails) with the small dark dots of oak trees along them, defining their routes, but the paper was still so wet when I dropped them in that they became big bloomy dark dots! I had to pull them out into lines with my brush, leaving too many of them and not giving sufficient definition. Likewise, with the closer-up bunches of trees, they're a little smudgy. Finally, I wish I had left a lot more light and white in that dried grass along the bit of road in the foreground, to give the picture more punch and sparkle.

Oh, and finally, at some point I stuck my big fat thumb into the sky and had to paint that out as well!

Since this is one of the first landscapes I have ever attempted, and also one of the first wet-in-wet paintings, I'm going to say that it's okay, post it, and move on.

DAY 17: SO CAL HILLSIDES

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019