Hill & dale

(C) 2016 Dale DiMauro

This is a watercolor I started earlier this week. In my mind it is not complete as the figure and foreground needs more work. I have been eager to add figures into my landscapes, beginning with the smaller pictures. I always see people walking through the fields and trails on the Brattleboro Retreat property, which is many, many acres, with cellphone in hand and a dog nearby. I find by adding a figure it gives the landscape a sense of scale and entirely changes the focus of the picture. You have to get the figure right as the viewer tends to zooms in on the person. I have always been taken by scenes where individuals are out in the landscape hiking, canoeing, fishing, etc. To my mind there is no better place than Vermont to portray this. 

I am rethinking how to paint my skies, or at least some of them. I usually start with a wet wash on wet paper and slowly build up the sky with several washes until there is some sort of gradation from the horizon up. As a result I have tried all kinds of blues and grays to create a wide variety of skies. Lately, I have been considering preserving the white of the paper where the sky will be and painting with a loaded brush on a dry surface so as to apply the scratchy drybrush effect on the edges and achieve greater color contrasts.