Today is a dedicated watercolor day. My friend and fellow painter Roger Whitlock and I have a project we’ve developed in which we get together and paint a wide variety of subjects, each delivering our own take on the theme or locale. The final intention is to show them side by side.
A watercolor magazine is interested in our project as well (which means an upcoming publication deadline), and so I have a lot of partially completed things to pull together from our outings.
Today will see me working on three paintings; the one illustrated here is a plein-air piece done just after sunrise this morning at a very dramatic location, Makapu’u beach. We’d worked there yesterday, where I took a stab at this subject after a false start on another piece. Basically, I hadn’t followed the advice which I give my own students, which is to avoid “drive-by” painting, where you rush into something without sufficient preliminary thought. Circumstances being what they were, I plunged ahead, which rarely yields the best results for me.
But I used yesterday’s flops as a stepping stone, and decided to return bright and early and see if I couldn’t get this worked out a bit better. I’m pleased with the result, a vertical sea painting with a lot of rather foreboding darks. I think it will nicely compliment the beautiful piece Roger is sure to paint when we return here Monday.
Now, I’m off to tackle two more half finished pieces before sundown.
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