I’ve had to keep this one under wraps until I know the gift has been given. Today, I’d like to show you some in-progress shots of this commissioned landscape. We’ll talk about process, and next week I’ll reveal the finished painting, long since delivered to its intended recipient.
The process really starts when the client contacts the artist, me in this case, about painting a sentimental place as a gift for an important person. One-good photograph and a written agreement is all it takes. I sketched the landscape directly on tracing paper because it’s easier to transfer onto the watercolor block this way. With a client approved sketch, I use Saral transfer paper to trace my simple sketch onto the final paper, in this case Arches smooth hot press.
My plan of attack was to finish painting the sky before I started anything else. With watercolors, it’s always easier in my opinion to work from top-to-bottom, and painting in general is easier back-to-foreground. The sky, therefore, is often a great place to start with any watercolor painting. Using different values of a single hue of blue, I washed in the clouds and moved the paint around fairly quickly until I was satisfied. Next, I laid some very basic ground washes, and moved onto the mountains, still working back-to-foreground.
It is always very helpful to see the range of values needed in a painting if the darkest points are established early on. So immediately after the mountains began taking shape, I put down the blackest-blacks. Having very dark values laid down early tells you how far you need to push your mid-range values to meet the dark spaces. Here, for the cavernous windows in the tower, I literally used a waterproof black marker. The other very dark values, like the trees, were still done in watercolor. With my bright white and dark blacks establishes, I could start filling in what falls between.
