Railroad Crossing, near Coffee Street

Yes there is a street named Coffee street- what a great name. As I did this painting it started to lightly rain, more of a fine mist that picked up in intensity. I managed to pretty much finish it, the final touches of black and red blurred a bit, and the actual rain made little pock marks in the washes. At least I got a rain effect in the painting without even doing anything!

Making decent purples is always a challenge, even the store-bought (tube) purples come out looking like burgandy. In this case I used phthalo blue and quinacridone magenta for the blues and purples in the wet road. Quinacridone is a relatively new type of pigment, at least it is new to me. In retrospect I had quinacridone red/orange in my collection for awhile but never used it much. Now there are over a dozen variations ranging from red to purple to violet.

The dark colour was bloodstone genuine, a Daniel Smith mineral paint formula that is quickly becoming a favorite- it is a warm, dark coffee colour (!), granulating mixture that has a lot of gum arabic, so it stays in place. I was surprised and pleased that I could use it on the final details and have it mostly stay considering how wet everything was. It was used to create the railroad, the fence, the trees, the crossing bar, and the ever present cracks in the road.

5 x 7 rough press, watercolour, April 2020