Winter Demo for SCAN

Making a demo painting is never easy for me, but the lovely folks at SCAN are always so welcoming! (SCAN regularly provides art demos for their membership.) I thank them for their kindness and support!

   Today I joined them for an afternoon and painted my version of a winter scene using watercolor. The scene could be along any road in CT, but I made a little sketch that included some thoughts from other paintings and included taming down my palette. Someone did comment that my other paintings seem to have "all the colors"! 

   Watercolor sometimes has its own way of doing things, so my little preliminary sketch was simply a starting point. I wanted the painting to show the coolness of winter and intended to include more blues, but it went blue and mauve . . . and that's OK. I wanted the sky to have a little color action, but not take away from the foreground. I wanted to show that trees have diversity while telephone poles don't so much . . . and that's OK. On the way into Newtown I drove by a big yellowy-brown barn, a departure from the common red barn, so . . . I got that in and it helped give the painting a mood.  I wanted to explain and demo simple perspective and things I can make happen along the painting way to achieve that . . . and I did that. I wanted to talk about why it's worth spending a few extra dollars and owning a few special brushes and what they do . . . and I did that.  And, I wanted to encourage other artists to paint outside and understand some of the benefits that come from that . . . and I included that, too!

  Looking back at the painting, there's room for improvement, but it's a decent demo!