Colors of Taos

The Taos Watercolor workshop for 2019 is over and I am back in Denver. Thank you to the artists who took the workshop and made it such a rewarding experience. Once again the Mabel Dodge Luhan House was the perfect headquarters with so many things to paint right on site. This painting was done at the end of Ledoux Street at an earlier workshop. I have not yet loaded the paintings from this year onto my computer so they will show up on later emails. In this painting I was attracted to the colorful cast shadows on the adobe wall and blue door. Working on site is so much better that working from photographs because a camera usually doesn't capture the colors in cast shadows. Here the red violet in the cast shadows was a nice complement to the green leaves causing this area to vibrate with color excitement. The cast shadows on both walls were the same and it was my choice to use artistic license and make them richer and more vibrant in the area of the blue door. I painted the adobe walls with a subtle mixture of cobalt violet and yellow ochre and for the cast shadows I added some mineral violet to the mixture. The blue door is cerulean blue and the leaves are olive green with ultramarine blue added for the darker values. The tree branches are a mixture of burnt sienna, raw umber, and ultramarine blue. The foreground is a strange mixture of cobalt violet, cerulean blue, and raw umber that we jokingly refer to as "pendleton mud." The sunlight in Taos is legendary and I did my best to capture it in this painting titled "Colors of Taos." One final note, you can still sign up for my weekend workshop at Sterne Park May 31st, June 1st, and June 2nd. I give out directions to the park when you sigh up and if you are interested send me an email to pendletonstudio@gmail.com.

Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton