Blue Fall A digital watercolour work in progress by Joan A Hamilton

 

 

 

 

I wanted to round out my portfolio of northern Ontario inspired landscapes by a fall painting or two. I have resisted painting fall foliage somewhat because sometimes believe it or not, I find Mother Nature just a little too garish in her tastes. The first colours that come to my mind of autumn are the intense crimson and oranges of maples and beech trees. Blues become more intense possibly because they are against their colour complement orange.

These two colours together as vivid and garish as they are seem more natural to me now. They remind me of stained glass windows. I want the light in my painting to have a kind of spiritual overtone. So the light needs to appear to be shining through things, even though the reality of the scene does not totally support that.

 

Another thing I am aiming for is to reduce the amount of detail in my paintings and sugggest detail more than actually painting it all in. Your imagination can fill in the rest of the scene as needed. (Sorry theWIP sign is kind of distracting, but I found out someone had copied some of my other work in progress work.) 

 

 

 

Copyright Joan A Hamilton (all rights reserved)

 

Update: The final version of Blue Fall is posted today! It is a departure from my usual colour palette in the sense that I used exaggerated colours that intensified and strengthened the contrast beteween warm and cool. I ended up wetting the painting too many times and it makes it look less crisp and in the future I will try to remember to only use that technique near the end of the painting. There is a mini tutorial on how to do it here. How to Wet Entire Watercolour Layer  .

This is one of the first paintings with waves in it. I am learning to paint them. Quite tricky, so don't laugh!

 

 Please feel free to comment on this work in progress. Any parts that stretch your imagination too much? Like the shoreline in the foreground! Yes, I haven't figured out what to do there?

 any ideas anyone?

 

Update: * As you can see I used grasses to overlap the line between the water and the shore.

 

 

Skip Allen has a cool brush in his Eastern Water Brush Set called Wild and Free that I changed to a Digital Watercolour (In General change Method to Digital Watercolour). Skip has created a wide variety of Watercolour Brushes in Corel Painter 11 which greatly increases my brush repretoire! I am endlessly grateful to him for his generosity in sharing his talents as a Watercolour Brush Creator Master. Joining the Painter Talk Forum is all you have to do to obtain them free. There is a link in my Blogroll. It is a wonderful forum for those learning to paint digitally using various painting programs not just Corel Painter. Drop me a line if you decide to join!