Friday, October 18, 2013

Travel Painting #5

                                Great Smoky Mountains National Park

This is the last painting I did on my road trip home.  It was the second of two that I painted that day in the Smokies last week.  I'm happy to report that the  Watercolor Painting Club posted the first Smokies painting on their website as a highlighted piece, and as of a few minutes ago it had over 3.6K  likes and 406 shares!  Nice to be recognized by so many fine watercolorists.

The clouds in this painting were casting the most wonderful shadows on the mountains.  The same technique that I mentioned in the last post came in handy for this piece, too.  The greens were again a focus.  Using a tube green just won't cut it.  Either mix the green with an earth tone or a yellow on the palette (but don't overmix it into an homogenous straight green), or as I like to do, mix the greens on the paper. 

Yellow is the first color that starts to disappear as the trees recede into the distance.  Since blue and yellow make green, that leaves shades of blue in the farthest peaks. 

It really helps to paint on location to observe the effects of light on the landscape.  So get out there and look!

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