Ponte Delle Tette, Venice

I started by putting down a pencil drawing and impressing a few lines on it with a pointy stick.  Then, as is usual with my coloured pencil paintings, I just putting layer after layer of colour, as lightly as possible but gradually needing to apply more pressure as the grooves in the paper filled with pigment.  The colours that I put on were a mixture of local colour, colours reflecting light and shadow, impressionistic colours that I could see in the source photo, impressionistic colours that I couldn’t see in the source photo and unifying warm glazes (including Venetian red).  Once I felt that the paper was close to being filled to capacity, I burnished the painting all over with the white pencil.

Throughout the painting I was trying to keep the background buildings loose and unfocused, as I would have done with watercolour.  After I’d added the burnishing layer, I decided to make the painting a little more watercoloury by painting on a layer of coloured pencil blending medium.  It helped that it was quite warm today so I could keep a window open.  And that was me done.

I ended up with a painting that’s not too bad and worth putting up for sale.  But it’s not a personal favourite.  It feels a bit washed out to me and I’m thinking that this is because there aren’t any really dark areas in it.  Maybe I should stick to source material with big black areas that I can colour in layers of red, blue and green.  They’re not only more satisfying to paint, they also look better, at least to my eyes.  I’m also thinking that I should have put a few layers of light greys on the lighter concrete bits rather than adding so many impressionistic colours.  And the water might be a bit too green, even for Venice.