Taking Your Time

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I love doing small paintings like this, 7x10 inches, where I can take my time and work on specific things like color application. Every color in this painting was applied with specific intent. To explain what I mean I will start with the pear. I mixed lemon yellow with just a tiny bit of cerulean blue without stirring it up so you could see bits of both colors. How you use the brush to apply paint is important and here I dabbed the paint onto the paper to create texture while adding more cerulean blue on the bottom of the pear. While this was still damp, I added the cast shadow with cerulean blue allowing the colors from the pear to blend into the cast shadow. I like to think of the object and the cast shadow as one shape without a strong defining line between the two. I also think of cast shadows as ways to add interesting color and seldom paint them exactly as I see them.

Next, I took some of the same two colors and dabbed them onto the side of the glass vase to represent reflected color. If you look carefully you can see a couple of my fingerprints that added texture in this area. I could have used an apple or a banana but I chose a pear because it reminded me of the shape of the violin.

Now let's look at the dresser. For the top shelf I mixed a light gray with cerulean blue and a little cadmium red. This light value not only shows the light coming from above, it also allows the different cast shadows to be clear and clean. For the edge of the shelf, I added yellow ochre to cobalt violet and allowed them to mix right on the paper. Because I didn't stir up the colors you can clearly see bits of both. For the cast shadows hanging down from the white flower, I added cerulean blue with cobalt violet. The nob on the door was painted with yellow ochre for the rim and burnt sienna for the darker part.

Now for the drawers, I mixed raw umber, cerulean blue and burnt sienna. After this was dry I glazed burnt sienna on top allowing the first color to show through while warming up the surface. When glazing, it is important to use transparent colors applied carefully with as few brushstrokes as possible. The dark lines between the drawers is a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. Painting irregular lines is important because straight clean lines would not give the "old" effect that I want. This is enough to think about so stay tuned next Sunday to see how I completed the painting. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton