And not so exotic paintings

To me anyways, London Ontario was not considered to be exotic. But I suppose if someone were visiting from far-off Reunion Island it would seem exotic. In this scene, I set up in a parking lot at the famous City View breakfast diner, with a view of the city in the background. It was an ambitious painting, probably done in 1998, complete with poles, wires, paint on parking lot, a car, and plenty of other details. I used cerulean blue back then, but since stopped due to its poor mixing qualities and slight toxicity. 

City View London Ontario, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1998

This is among the first location paintings I ever did, during winter of 1995/1996. To think, the internet was not even a big thing at the time, although I was playing around with the Gopher server, a list-based early version of the internet. It was overcast on this day, and I captured a soft range of pastels using a limited palette. 

Park structure winter overcast,  watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1996

By 1997 or so I had incorporated cerulean blue in my palette which you see in the sky. It was my go-to blue sky colour until I switched to phthalo blue sapphire (PB15 red shade) and viridian hue (PG7) in the year 2020. I was adding cerulean to shadows at the time, you can see the violet appearance on the structure's shadows. 

Park structure winter sunny, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1997

I assume this was done afterwards in the summer of 1998 perhaps, I wasn't into record-keeping back then although I tired. There was an old University calendar where I documented which paintings I did on which day, but never kept it up. I started blogging around 2006, then moved to Blogger in 2008. 

Park structure summer, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1998