Skinny watercolor collection

(C) 2017 Dale DiMauro

When I took this photograph earlier in the day I said to myself, I have to blog about this. For various reasons I have been painting portraits and landscapes on these narrow but vertical sheets. The most recent skinny watercolor I have worked on is the one on the far right. Plumbers were making a racquet in our house last week so I escaped to the upstairs and it was simply easier to work on a slim sheet. I originally worked on a skinny sheet because it was a remnant from a larger watercolor when framing. As I mentioned in a previous post, this vertical orientation is great for painting figure studies before I commit to the final painting.

The subject matter for the painting on the left was inspired from last summer's trip to Maine while the middle picture is more or less made up because I wanted to convey through an individual's posture a strong presence which I think is strengthened as the viewer is looking up towards him and then on to the sky. In the last image I was trying to achieve darks in areas of the water with less applications of paint in addition to creating dry brush affects in the sky with some hard edges.

Each one of the watercolor sheets above is manufactured by Saunders, an english paper producer. However, each one is of a different thickness with the heaviest on the left(300lb) while the middle picture is on 200lb and the far right is a 140lb paper. Each of the papers is of a cold pressed variety which means there is some texture, not smooth but enough tooth to create painterly effects depending upon how you paint.