Blog and painting #58

This painting is a bit of a combination of a photo (black and white) and my memory of this place, the building on the right is just from my memory, this is Hillsdale Arboretum, in this particular place, the buildings are on hills or up on a rise, but with these small paintings I couldn't portray that, so, I used my artistic license and moved it where I wanted it, so, if you go to this place, you will see that the building is really up and not on this level, oh well, I just thought it needed this small feature, even though it is just a small slice of the total building (which is really round), I decided to attempt to put it in. I'm trying to get better about not putting in so much detail, so this is my attempt at it. One of the reasons I picked this photo is because of the light, in this painting, I used green and purple as the dominant colors, I'm thinking strongly of doing this painting again using a yellow sky and working with my transparent watercolors, obviously, this painting is done with opaques, so I really am looking forward to attempting this one with the transparents, we'll see if that happens, so you may see this composition again, just FYI.

I started out with a very light green and very light violet (or purple), of course these are opaques (and I really mean gouache), then I put in the middle light green for the bushes and I decided that the light that I saw in the middle looked like a weeping cherry, well, on a second look, I think it really was just the light hitting the lower branches of the pine trees in the far background, but, I think it needs that pink to counteract the green, so I left it. Then, I jumped in with some darks for the bushes and the tree on the far left then decided to put purple for the shadows, into that I put light on top of the dark, just like in oil painting. I laid the grass shadow color on top of the purple in the foreground I made grass shapes to indicate that they are really grass in the shade. I think this little painting works, and I like it, so hope you do too.