Sedona, Arizona

Yesterday’s High Noon painting was a bit lacking in colour for one of my creations, so I thought I’d do something colourful today: a three colour landscape.  I went for my newest set of watercolours and, after some experimental swatching on the back of that failed panting from a couple of days ago, chose Winsor blue (green shade), permanent alizarin crimson and Winsor orange as my three primaries – the orange counted as my yellow.  These are all colours not in my first choice palette of twelve, or even the preceding palette of sixteen but, being a cool blue, warm yellow and cool red count as a triadic left panting in my terminology.

There’s not much to say apart from that.  I drew the picture and coloured it in with the three primaries.  The rocks were looking a bit monotone in red and orange, so I dropped in some of the blue, which had a fantastic effect.  To get lines and cracks in the sandstone, I brought in sepia and cadmium red from the opaques shelf so that I could apply them wet into wet without them spreading everywhere (that’s what’s great about opaques).  I dabbed on the foliage with the blue and the orange plus some titanium white (which felt necessary), all using a Terry Harrison foliage brush.  Finally, I added the two birds for a bit of interest.  I painted them on first with a neutral mixed from my three primaries, then dropped in bits of red, blue and orange for variation.

And I do like what I’ve ended up with.  The three primaries form a great power trio but it’s that Winsor blue green shade that’s  the star both in the sky and on the sides of the rocks.  On the rocks, my A level chemistry tells me it has the look of rusty copper or maybe copper carbonate, so maybe there’s some copper in that pigment?
Anyway, decent job today.  It’s up for sale.