"I overworked it." It's that temptation to go in once more, to try to infuse a different color that unfortunately turns to mud, or to try to lift a color off the surface that was unfortunately a staining color and therefore unliftable, to correct a line or a shape that looked spontaneous before and now just looks like you messed it up.
On the other hand—and this is so rare that no one even talks about it—sometimes overworking something turns out to be a good thing. You get it to a point and think, Okay, stop! and then you look at it again in 10 minutes, and you see where you left out something important, or could make something look a little more convincingly like itself if only it had a few more darks, and you take courage in hand to keep going and Hey, it worked!
That was how I felt about this one. I borrowed the reference photo from a fellow on Facebook who is on a cross-country bike trip and takes marvelous shots of his route every day, but I wasn't sure I could pull it off in paint.
The thing about it is, the shadows don't look right, because the objects casting the shadows (the trees) are for the most part "out of frame," so the logic seems wrong. But I just started at the top and laid in the flat background colors, then painted the vignette of the far distance. Then I proceeded from top to bottom again, laying in those shadows line by line at the proper angles. I kept going back and tweaking them until the light and dark spots on the road corresponded more or less to those on the verge and down onto the grass, and then...I finally stopped. Had lunch, came back, and thought, Hmmm! a few more darks, the road sign I left out...and five minutes later, I was finally satisfied. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than I expected!
Thanks to Sam Taggart for this wonderful vista.
DAY 18: Shadowy Road
About 6x12 inches
#30x30DirectWatercolor2019
(Here's the original. I wanted to use the long narrow piece of Fluid watercolor paper I had left after yesterday's painting.)
No comments:
Post a Comment