Avenue du Parc- Avenue d'orange?

What defines a landscape, a building, a mountain, a lake, how about construction? Usually I try to find defining scenes...  when in Paris, I painted the Eiffel Tower, ok maybe that example is a little cliche, but you get the point. As I walked around my neighbourhood, it became obvious that the defining feature of Montreal was the construction, in this case on ave du Parc which they have been digging up and repaving for over a year now. The added attraction was the challenge of capturing the fluorescent orange....

That's my cue to explain how to paint fluorescent orange with watercolours. You may be tempted to go out and buy orange paint and then put it on straight, but this has two problems, one there is really no orange paint in most watercolour brands, and two, it would turn out looking flat and brown. Instead, try a glazing technique. I've talked about this in past blogs, mostly in the abstract paintings, in this landscape I used glazing to make the bright orange. To do it, I start by putting down a layer of bright yellow (permanent lemon) in the shape of the signs and other orange elements. Once completely dry I then overlay with a layer of a transparent red like a thin wash of vermillion lake. When I got home, the orange wasn't orange enough, so I put on a third layer of thin vermillion lake, and voila!

Avenue du Parc- Avenue d'orange? 11 x 7.5" cold press, watercolour, 2012 (No. 1918)