Catching up!

The skies have been tumultuous and exciting--promise of thunderstorms that never rain into my garden. Great for painting but bad for flowers and vegetables. Friday's sunset watercolor was painted about 8:20 pm facing west with some scraggly cumulus clouds crawling along slowly above the trees.

The sunset colors were just beginning to appear in the clouds but I was driven indoors by mosquitoes. I am using an older traveler's Winsor & Newton watercolor kit which contains half pans of pigment. It is very handy to slip this folding metal palette on my left thumb, but challenging for brush size. My preference is for larger brushes which don't always dip cleanly into the half pans. I like to think of the adjacent color as a bonus, but will use smaller brushes if I find that I'm creating muddy colors!

Saturday was a incredibly busy and exhausting so this little pencil and charcoal sketch of thunder clouds was all I could manage. There are high cirrus clouds above and away from the fluffy cumulus rain clouds. 


Sunday was cumulus cloud-fest--a feast for the eyes and, eventually, a few drops of rain. These big, fluffy clouds were painted about 5:30 pm before the brief storm facing east with the storm coming in from the southwest.  


Again the positive and negative space is a mental challenge in watercolor. The fluffy white mass of the cloud is simply the white of the paper. The massive shadow beneath the cloud is the closest to us on the ground and it can sometimes be a barrier to seeing the entire cloud with all its nuances of grays and whites.


The contrast between the deep ultramarine blue sky and the crisp white cumulus fluff is my favorite part of this painting. I also like the cerulean blue peeking out between clouds and the richness of the gray shadows.