Tuesday, June 18, 2024

sligachan, skye

                                 10x12

This is one of the scenes James Potter painted on Skye... Check out his YouTube channel. I really enjoy it.
I'm dissatisfied with this but I'm not exactly sure why. I have a feeling the paper is too small for the subject?
Looking at Andrew Wyeth and John Marin watercolors I want to push myself to go bigger, 16x20 or 22x30 even.
Pretty scary but I should try.

3 comments:

Lisa Le Quelenec said...

Just a suggestion but I think if you lifted some of the colour from the background peeking through the arches it would push the bridge forward just a touch and the background back. I love the brushwork and texture of the bridge and am interested to see a bigger version where the brushmarks would have more room to dance says she who always works small ;o)

RH Carpenter said...

I think this is wonderful! And bigger doesn’t always mean better although I had a teacher tell me once that, when you paint large the mistakes are not as obvious! Ha ha. I usually can’t paint small - used to paint on full sheets or half sheets and now mostly do 4th sheet sizes on just about everything and that suits me okay.

laura said...

That's a great suggestion, Lisa. Thank you. I have a tendency to use the same intensity throughout, which is flattening.

Thanks, Rhonda. I seem to be pretty comfortable with 8x10 or 9x12, sometimes 11x15. Usually *after* I paint something I wonder what it would be like to do it bigger, with more room for the paint to run. Or, more rarely, smaller, especially pictures of birds: sometimes the scale just seems not optimal.