Youth Hostel Front Door, Valencia, Spain

Like a fool, I arrived in Valencia, Spain in the middle of the night only to find the hotel was not yet open for the season. Some people recommended a youth hostel to me, giving me directions in broken English . There I was in the middle of a strange town at night, with only a vague idea on where I was walking, and hardly a soul to keep me company. By some miracle I turned a corner and there it was, the youth hostel. I was greeted by several other happy travelers and the hostel owner, a former traveler himself, he shared some wine from a wine skin and we all rejoiced. He told us that he had designed the hostel to feel like a home- and that it did, the wood walls, the old lamps, the comfortable couches, and of course the good company. The next day I made a painting of the exterior, with the blue awning and Spanish flag, the yout hostel international logo to the right of the door, and of course that cloudless blue Spanish sky that makes me feel warm just thinking of it.

There are several shadows in this painting that give it a 3-dimensional feel. The Sun was just over my right shoulder, side-lighting the scene and creating long, sloping shadows. One of the shadows comes from an unseen object on the right of the scene, the other prominent shadow is cast by the blue awning. The awning has two other shadows, one on the very top of it, cast by the relief from the roof edge, and the other shadow on it's front, cast be the awning itself. I painted the shadows last, on top of the background colours, using a purply-brown version of the background colour. Usually I have some of the actual colour mixture left on the pallette, and just drop in some sky-blue and a touch of deep red, maybe some green, and voila! When dry, I put a few dark highlights on top of the shadows (e.g. dark bricks, and a dark blue box on the left of the door) to complete the illusion of a luminous shadow.

Youth Hostel Front Door, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1998 (No. 0889)