What better thing to do on a rainy day than to go out and make a watercolour painting? Here, I am sitting under the front entrance to our cultural center which of course is closed due to the pandemic. It offered protection from the rain although some drops were getting onto the paper. This scene was great because it had a lot of colour- there was lime green, ultramarine blue, and cherry red in the building, lilac blue and emerald green in the landscape, and the pop of orange in the umbrella. Actually the umbrella was black but I wanted to capture the spirit of Hiroshige who used that orange colour to depict hats.
Using triangles can really liven up a composition. In this painting, the sidewalk has several polygons, as does the road and sidewalk. The actual 'triangles' would go off the page, try to imagine the beam on top, and the sidewalk on the bottom eventually converging on the same point, which would be to your left. Hiroshige used this composition a lot in his designs. Now that I understand the power of the triangular composition, I keep seeing new scenes that I can do, but hopefully the weather gets better soon!
5 x 7" rough press, watercolour (plus extra water from the sky), March 2020
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