The Colours Of Nuuk

It’s really cold outside today but I wanted to do some watercolour painting, so I picked some subject matter that had lots of simple shapes and where I might be able to get away with just three layers of paint. I’m back in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, which means it’s another outing for my tundra supergranulators.  Today they’re supplemented by Indian yellow from my regular palette.

As you can probably tell (or guess), I started by putting down a pencil drawing and reserving lots of whites with masking fluid.  I also spattered on a little bit of masking fluid for some snowy effects.

I didn’t start from the sky and work my way forwards today.  Instead I started from the buildings.  In reality they’re quite a bright yellow and green, so I used Indian yellow to brighten them.  I applied a single layer of Indian over all the yellow and green areas, the idea being that this would unify the houses.  After this I put on a second layer: tundra orange for the yellow buildings and tundra green for the green ones.  I’d already tried these glazes out on some scrap paper.  For the roofs I used tundra violet and for the grey walls at the bottom some mix of tundra blue, pink and violet.  I added shadows on planes not facing the sun and on the underside of the roofs: tundra blue on the yellow buildings and tundra violet on the green ones.

Then came the really interesting stuff: the sky and the snow.  In the top half of the painting, I used tundra blue, pink and violet.  Mainly the blue and the pink.   My source photo had no sky in it, only snow, but I deviated from this, liking the idea of having common colours within the sky and snow and of letting the two merge into each other in places.  I was careful to leave a long, hard edged horizon line in a few places, though, just to make it clear that this really was sky and snow.  I also sprinkled some salt on the snow to exaggerate the difference between the two areas.

For the snow at the bottom, I was more adventurous, dropping in some tundra green and tundra violet in addition to the other three tundra colours.  I still threw on some salt though.

As final steps after removing all the masking fluid, I put some tundra pink and blue into the snow on the rooftops and some tundra blue along one side of any unmasked white lines that were feeling too thick.  And then I was done.

And, oh yes, this one is a success and is going up for sale.  The lost edges between the sky and the snow worked exactly how I wanted them to.  The man made buildings contrast against their untamed surroundings.  But they also fit in because they’re colourful and some of those colours are reflected in the snow.  I’m glad I ventured outside today, even if it was freezing.