Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Experimenting with Painting Skies

                                                                                     (C) 2025 Dale DiMauro
 

Often I will turn over an unfinished plein air watercolor painting and just start painting on the backside. This is the case with this watercolor.

I keep developing my approach to painting the sky in watercolor. It is very easy or instinctive to paint a graded blue wash for the sky. However, most days are not truly full of blue skies. Also, the sky really conveys the mood for your scene so there is a large opportunity for me to seize.

In this sky I lifted out paint where the streaks of white are. Also, as the pigments dried I dropped in water or sprayed mist which created cloud-like shapes with soft and hard edges. These are some approaches I look forward to developing in the future.

Stepping back from this painting I can see how a J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) influence may have seeped in. Turner was a landscape painter who left a vast quantity of watercolors, in addition to his oil paintings.

But no -I have not even thought of J.M.W Turner, in some time, even though I do find his work intriguing.

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