Winter Work

Although the cold and snow have kept me indoors, a lot of the time I stand at one or the other of the studio windows longing for the outdoors. These past few weeks I've posted about the weather (January and Snow in Silverpoint) and included sketches and drawings of the woods and creek outside, my appetite remains unsatisfied. So here are a few more winter works.

"Sunny Moment on Druid Hill Creek," watercolor, 4x6 on paper

This is a postcard-sized watercolor of a short span of Druid Hill Creek on a sunny winter day. The skies had cleared overnight, which lets the land radiate much more heat and causes temperatures to drop. The day before had been warm enough to melt some of the snow on the banks and on the ice covering of the creek, but then the plunge gave us deeper ice and shivering cold despite the warm yellow light. It was interesting to capture both the cool blues of the icy surfaces and the yellow sunlight on the remaining snow cover.

"Winter Sun," gouache and watercolor, 5x7 on panel

Gouache hasn't been one of my favored mediums for a long while. Partly that's because my interests shifted to digital, casein, watercolors, and metalpoint. Nonetheless one application I have for gouache is to touchup watercolors using titanium white. But I had a 5x7 panel that had been stained and a little time to experiment so I used titanium white gouache as a base and mixed some colored gouache by adding transparent intense watercolor. Then using that stained panel the gouache at right was the result. "Winter Sun" is my first gouache in several years.

My plan is to start painting outdoors very soon, given that the midpoint of February is past. So more landscapes are in the future, both watercolor and oil (and perhaps a casein or two as well).