Echoes of the Farm

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. In my sketchbook workshop, one of the places we paint is an Outdoor Museum which is a wonderful setup with barns, farmhouse, working blacksmith, farm animals, windmill, old school house, log cabin, and a museum filled with historical implements and photo's showing how the pioneers lived. I painted this behind the farmhouse where the vegetable garden spilled over into a flower garden.

I encouraged the other artists to focus in on one thing and build their composition around that. In my case, I liked the way the shed window was surrounded by the fence and flowers. Starting with the window, I painted the glass with cerulean blue and mineral violet making sure to leave a streak of light for interest. The darkest part of the window is burnt sienna mixed with ultramarine blue.

Next, I painted the side of the shed with yellow ochre and burnt sienna allowing the colors to mix on the paper. Now onto the fence where I used a mixture of yellow ochre, cobalt violet and mineral violet. It needed to be a darker value than the color of the shed and the mineral violet helped with that. Olive green, mineral violet, ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, perylene green, and cerulean blue were all used for the flowers. It was important to leave bits of white paper among the flowers to represent sunlight. Only a few flowers were painted in detail and the others were suggested with simple marks of color. To much detail in this area would have competed with the window. As the flowers and fence curved around the window, I added a few hanging vines to finish the composition. As I tell the students, zero in on one thing or area and then keep it simple. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton