HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

                                                                               (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

With this busy holiday season I have not been able to draw or paint as I would have liked. Plus my wife is still recovering from the surgery she had earlier in December. However, the various snow accumulations have freshened up the local landscape on these shortest days of the year.

Sometimes I simply put down a quick watercolor study as this one in my small watercolor book that I purchased at the Brattleboro Food Co-Op. I like this bound-book put out by elseware as it is a thicker paper with a nice texture. 

This combination of burnt umber and winsor violet creates a lovely dark red which sets a nice tone for the overall landscape. I have taken to adding lavender to my sky's on occasion and sometimes with payne's gray. It adds a pale color and offers a minor amount of drama to the overall scene.

Maple Picture Frame

                                                                                            (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

Recently, I made this maple picture frame at a local workshop at the hatchspace in downtown Brattleboro, VT. It has a spline in the corners to strengthen the miter joinery. This frame-making experience led me to join the hatchspace with their promotional offer. They have four floors of tools, work stations and spaces.

The hatchspace has a machine that makes frame profile stock out of your wood. This is a machine I want to learn more about. In addition, I have a corner joiner at home which I want to put to good use this Winter.

So there is a lot to learn about for me regarding frame-making. In watercolor that also includes cutting glass and mats and assembling this sandwich all as one unit.

I apologize for the glare in the upper right of the image. I tried to use the cropping/red eye software to minimize or eliminate this glare but it didn't take me as far as I would like too. However, I do think the watercolor looks pretty good within this frame.

Cobalt Blue & Burnt Umber

                                                                               (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

When you study the landscape you begin to see things for what they are. Over time you develop a clearer lens and this informs my decision when choosing what to paint and how to go about painting. Or at least that's how I feel about my painting.

It takes a great restraint to paint with a limited palette. Particularly when you limit yourself to two colors. Yet there is a great harmony of color when you use a simple palette.

This watercolor was painted with only cobalt blue and burnt umber. I like the light in this picture, it reminds me of the mid-winter noon hour. I have cross-country skied many days at this time of day. All the landscape elements are clearly defined by the light and the contrasting colors.

Color Swatches

                                                                                               (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro

In the past I have posted about the importance of painting color swatches in order to have a greater understanding of your color palette. With this practice my palette seems to continually expand.

For example, there are countless grays which can be produced as in the above photograph. However, there is such a range within the grays: warm and cool versions which add so much to a painting.

When I paint color swatches of plant combinations I turn them into miniature landscapes as a way to put them to use in painting. I paint these very intuitive and in a free-flow manner so as not analyze things too much.

Over time I realized I can get by with a limited palette as I better understand what I can do with the colors at my disposal.

Anders Zorn

                                                                                                 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

Anders Zorn(1860-1920) was a great artist from Sweden known for his mastery of watercolors and portraits in oil including United States presidents. He painted President William Taft and was a contemporary of John Singer Sargent.

This watercolor I did was inspired by a Anders Zorn watercolor, Sea Study, 1894. It was a small study 5" x 7-7/8". Zorn seemed to use a limited palette with a direct painting technique which caught my attention. I don't know his actual palette so I tried to replicate his colors.

For the sky I used ultramarine blue/raw sienna/paynes gray. And for the water I used ivory black and paynes' gray. I did my watercolor in one quick passage which I suspect Zorn may have done as well.

I saw Zorn's watercolor study in a book I purchased years ago titled: Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter.

Retreat Field

                                                                                                (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

Capturing the landscape in pencil or paint is both an obsession and a meditative state for me. The act of recording a scene makes me pay attention to what I see and then the practice of painting calms me down so that I am in the present moment like no other activity I can think of.

I just started this watercolor an hour or so ago and like how it is progressing. Like most artists the light is what caught my eye with this composition. That light makes the whole landscape seem special or at least noteworthy.

There is such a freshness to this watercolor with the pleasing pigments and the blending of colors that the warmth of light seems to be a result of the act of painting. That heavy shadow in the foreground seems to sharpen the view of the distant landscape.

At times the less you paint the more powerful the image can become. Would a figure in the foreground ruin this picture for you?

Retreat Meadows

                                                                                    (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro
 

This fall we had mild weather and amazing color on our deciduous trees which hung on the branches longer than usual. I think the dry conditions was the reason we had an extended, yet glorious season.

I simply did not have time to paint outside as much as I would like So I resorted to photographing the fall colors and fading light which lit up the landscape to amazing effect.

This color saturation forced me to broaden my color palette in ways I usually don't. I used 'brilliant orange', a Holbein watercolor pigment, to try to match the orange-red of the distant hills and it still didn't match the intensity of color I saw out in the landscape.

This fall scene does remind me of some of Winslow Homer's watercolors of the Adirondack Mountains occupied by hunters and fisherman.

Considering black in your watercolor palette?

                                                                                         (C) 2024 Dale DiMauro

Black is a challenging color in watercolor, at least for me. Most tube blacks in my experience are dull and flat out of the tube. Ivory black I have found useful when mixed with other pigments, such as payne's gray  when I need to develop a painting quickly.

However, I have come upon a new combination of ultramarine blue with burnt sienna and alizarin crimson. This makes a lively black wth some variation of dark tones. 

You can see this combination in the above watercolor study I painted recently. This picture has one wash and it reads as one variation of black except for the white of the paper.