Certain events this August—fires in California and a bout with bronchitis—conspired to keep me around home. Since I was not feeling too bad, I tried to make the most of my home stay and among other things took walks in my neighborhood, always with a phone camera.
Today, inspired by the beautiful shapes of some deciduous trees, I snapped a photo and later painted the scene back in my studio. I had passed these same trees many times on different walks, but something about the blue sky and the summer leaves caught my attention this time.
I used my “Northwest Palette” consisting of burnt sienna, raw sienna, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, and a touch of alizarin crimson. After setting down a light wash of cerulean, I quickly charged in all the other colors using thick paint to achieve the dark background values, carefully painting around the tree shapes to preserve the whites.
Later thinking about my inspiration for the watercolor, a quote from Marcel Proust came to mind (and I paraphrase): “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”
KC