Thursday, September 11, 2014

Watercolor Landscape - Palm Grove

"Palm Grove"   SOLD
watercolor on paper, 2014
9" x 13" (22.86cm x 33.02cm)

This palm grove near home made for a simple subject but challenging compositional design. Its simple design motif of the palm tree shapes could too easily lead to a boring design of repetitive shapes.
The right cropping and ratio of positive to negative shapes is what makes it work. The only trees shown in their full outline are the yellow green ones which are not big within the overall composition.

I took a more graphic approach for this watercolor using value for atmospheric depth but ignoring the rule of warm foreground to cooler bluer colors (only) as the landscape recedes, except for the distant tree line of blue and purple.
I like to test various ways of depicting distance and here I put the coldest color, blue, in the foreground, a blue green in the near middle ground, changing to a yellow green in the far middle ground. The far background falling into the cooler range of purple and blue.
The alternating cool, warm, cool still does a good job of showing distance - cool foreground, warm middle ground, cool background.
The color saturation and intensity falls somewhere in the middle of the scale but is low chroma.
I like to do simplistic studies like these to work out ideas for the more involved paintings. That way I am not committing huge blocks of time only to find out it did not work.289

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