A Little More Brazil

This painting was done after a short break... sometimes it helps to recharge the creative batteries. Brazil has been an inspirational force for me lately, and in this painting I tried to capture a more colourful world with free flowing lines. The drawing was a composite of doodles from last years notes, a dali-like clock sits in the middle of the scene... but not melting!

To make the painting more colourful I chose a complementary triad of red blue yellow, which gives it a primary school crayon feeling. The key to making this colour scheme work is keeping the primaries fairly low key... if you blast off with the yellow straight from the tube than it will look really fake... so in watercolour this is easy to deal with, dilute with a bit of water and add some 'dirty paint' to neutralize. By dirty paint I just mean that brown-grey soup that accumulates at the corners of the palette, it is very useful for neutrals.

11x15" cold press Feb. 2013