The White Picket Fence
Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Starting on the 6th of February 2024, I am teaching a four week in-person class at the Art Students League of Denver titled "Landscape With Fence In Watercolor." There is still space available and to can find more information Click Here. This is a plein air painting that I did as a demonstration for a workshop in Louisville, Colorado.
It was a sunny morning and the cast shadows across this white fence, surrounded by flowers with the tree in the foreground, immediately caught my attention. I knew part of the fence would be unpainted white paper and that would sparkle surrounded by all the rich colors. The sidewalk was interesting and I chose to close it off with flowers and shrubbery just past the fence. Painting some of the pink roses in front of the tree trunk was another decision. This pushed the tree a little further back and added depth to the composition. With these few simple decisions I was ready to start painting.
Beginning with the tree, I mixed cobalt blue with yellow ochre and you can see bits of both colors along with some cobalt violet. I love the way this tree came up out of the foreground and overlapped the middle ground and background. This gives a three dimensional quality to the flat sheet of watercolor paper. Green is such an important color for landscape painting and here you can see different mixtures of lemon yellow, cerulean blue, olive green, cadmium yellow, French ultramarine blue, and perylene. With these colors, I mixed greens of different temperatures and different values. The cast shadows on the white picket fence are cerulean blue and you can see how I placed the darkest greens against the white fence so that I had the darkest dark against the lightest light creating counter charge. The roses were painted with rose dore and cobalt violet and the other flowers are cerulean blue, French ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, and cadmium red. Join my class and paint colorful subjects like this at the Art Students League of Denver. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton
