CN Tower, Rainy Day, Toronto

When it rains, watercolour painting becomes very challenging! I can see the raindrops in this painting, they landed when the paint was wet and created little snowflake effects. This scene was done in downtown Toronto, I am not even sure when exactly, but I recall painting about half a dozen paintings around the Spadina and U of T campus area.  There is an amazing amount of detail in such a small picture, all the overhead tram car wires, the tracks, window sills, leaves, even a red sign on the post. And oh yeah, the CN tower is hidden in the background!

The perspective lines in this painting are surprisingly good considering I did not do any preparatory work and used no pencil drawing underneath. I read a book recently from the library, it was called "Watercolor Secrets" by Robin Berry. She talked a lot about preparatory work and using photographs as source material. It made me think, if I had taken a photo of this scene maybe in the studio I could have merged this small study with a larger more accomplished work. I find landscape painting in a studio to be boring- it is hard to capture the feel you had when the tram car was rumbling by, the people were looking over your shoulder, and the rain started coming down.

5 x 7" cold press watercolour, Early 2000