Here, there, autumn colours everywhere

Here, there and everywhere there were autumn colours, including these construction signs! They were digging up part of the road and so closed off part of the bike path. After the signs, the path opened up, and is in fact, newly paved so riding on it is like a dream. I spilled a drop of paint in the upper portion of the sky, so decided to make it look like a group of geese were flying south. I forget who it was, but one of the people who taught me a few things about watercolour said to do that, it may have been John Joy, or maybe I read about it in a Soltan Szabo book. Anyways, its a good trick.

Bike path closure, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024

The commuter trains were busy picking up passengers and the train barriers were down. I should have called this painting clang clang clang clang because that was all I heard the whole time. It was a tricky painting, the main thing was to get the composition right with the curving sidewalk at the bottom and the train on an angle. With the sunset, it created a warm glow over everything.

Autumn colours commuter train, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024

Once again, here is a painting of traffic lined up on the Cavendish street hill, at the top is Sherbrooke running from west to east. The sky turned out amazing in this painting, I started with faint mixes of orange (PO62) and red-orange (PO73), then transitioned into a neutral, pale blue green (PG7), and worked up to the soft blue (PB15). The colour transitions are very subtle, but the big challenge is that when you change the colour on your brush in watercolour, the moisture level has to be the same, otherwise the sky produces backwashes and runs. To get it smooth and seamless like this involves a bit of skill, a bit of luck. There is also the bit of knowledge that between the orange and the blue is a very pale blue-green/cyan which feels wrong but is true. I did some colour analysis with the computer, and also found a Monet painting where he put green brush strokes in the middle of a sunset because he saw it without having to use a computer of course.

Cavendish traffic with sunset, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024