Painting one- Croney's Beach
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
I am attaching a watercolor I did this morning in my studio(no sun, threatening rain-welcome to New England). It is a copy of a painting by Claude Croney an artist I greatly admire. Croney was a New England painter who died several years ago after a long, successful career as painter, teacher and author. I especially like his watercolors which have great strength and tonality. He actually taught the three-value system that I use in teaching my watercolor students. This particular painting depicts a beach scene and although I used Mr. Croney's composition, I modified the approach somewhat because I am working on perfecting the tonal layering method of watercolor. So here was my approach: Underpainting from top to bottom using graded washes of ultramarine blue, to raw sienna back to ultramarine back to the sienna. While wet I wiped out continuous areas of white for flow/let dry. When dry I worked from back to front laying in correct tones and colors. I had to go back to glaze the distant mountain because it dried with too much texture to carry illusion of distance. I had to work hard on establishing focal point(can you tell where it is) ? and had to determine sun direction to create light and dark sides of rocks. I made the rocks go out of the picture to make open style composition which I like and linked dark passage from one end to the other. If I had to do it again (which I guess I do) I would pay more attention to the tone of the sky in initial wash. From now on I will make sure that my initial underpainting will include a sky that is as accurate as possible in terms of color and value. Remember watercolor dries lighter that applied so go a little darker than you think it looks. Overall I am happy with the result and look forward to doing my own beach scene plein air when the weather gets better.
Attached Files
| Croney's Beach.jpg | BobbyFarrell | Jun 30, 2009 | 688 KB |
