Thursday, June 3, 2021

Greenery Highlights

 

One concept that is important to my landscape paintings is to capture the interplay between nature and the urban environment. To paint this scene I stood adjacent to the community garden boxes which provided the rich earthy foreground element, with a good view of a cedar tree and more trees in the background. The parked SUV was central to the view, and it was reflecting gold and green highlights from the sky and foliage. The composition actually includes two perspectives, one is looking almost straight down at the garden elements, the other is looking up and to the right at the houses and shrubberies in the background. The front grille of the car looked like an angry gargoyle.

A few colour notes, I used the same cedar bark mix as discovered in the recent de la Savane painting,  for the greens I used benzi yellow (PY154) instead of the lemon version, and for that rich loamy earth in the foreground I used raw umber (PBr7) with carbon black (PBk6) and touches of perylene maroon (PR179).

Urban Jungle, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2680)

Walking down Fielding, the sun penetrated the overcast post-rain sky creating an intense highlight on a yellow-ochre brick house. I knew it would go away, sure enough by the time I got my gear ready to paint the scene was back to being drab and grey. From memory I crated the intense colours, and luckily the sun came out again and I could finish the painting. It is my favorite colour scheme, grey green brown blue. Another colour note, I brought some pyrrole vermilion (PR255) on the palette, it is an intense scarlet red, you see splashes of it on the top left buildings.

Ochre Highlight on Fielding Av, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2681)



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