The Landscape of Painting

Taking a break from oils for the moment

I’ve been thinking for several weeks now about changing direction temporarily with my paintings. I did this nice painting about a month ago:

Lakeside | 2009 | Stephen Springer Davis

I’ve been frustrated for some that I so often have to do paintings from photographs. The last several times I’ve been to Maine I’ve had disappointing (read as rainy) weather. My brother Criswell generously flew me to northern Utah about a year ago, and to the amazement of me and local residents it was really cold with nasty rain, pretty much everyday. I have pictures that I took on our trip, but the scenes are guess what? Rainy.

I haven’t painted with watercolors for years, so I’m trying out a return to see if I can develop something different from the landscapes I’ve been doing. I’ve had in the back of my mind to combine drawing and a looser kind of watercolor washes. I consider these to be sketches rather than finished artwork, and the intention is to be looser and more casual. Here are a couple recent drawings/paintings, done from some (guess what?) photos of England I had.

Street Scene England | 2009 | Stephen Springer Davis

In the drawing/painting above I use a both black waterproof and sepia non-waterproof ink along with a watercolor wash.

In the drawing/painting below I used waterproof black ink, watercolor wash and then white opaque watercolor for the highlights.

Street Scene England 2 | 2009 | Stephen Springer Davis

I’ll post new pieces as I continue to explore working with watercolors again.

Tags: drawings, Watercolors

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Current work, Watercolors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.