Rio Chama - WIPs 4, 5 and 6

Welcome back to the Rio Chama! I painted at the Art Club yesterday afternoon and, as always, found it to be very therapeutic to be there painting with my art buddies. During this week of intense preparations for the Oktoberfest art show coming Saturday, I needed to paint Thursday afternoon!

Here, I started laying in some tree shapes to break up some of the bowling alley effects created in the last WIP. The trees were there, and were a darker, cooler color than the other scrubby trees that were more like tall bushes. I wish I could tell you their botanical names, but my fund of knowledge does not extend to botany!. I was trying to go with what I know in working back to front, cool to warm as I came forward. In this panorama format you don't have much room to show distance so I tried to use all the tricks in the aerial perspective bag that I could.

I started laying in some of the feathery middle ground sagebrush shapes, and with gouache this is easily done by putting the basic middle values in and then highlighting with a lighter mixture of the same color. This seems so backwards to me since, as I mentioned earlier, I am used to saving the lights and doing them first and then the darks. My brain is saying HUH? I then started adding more darks to ground the bushes. When in doubt, I usually start adding the darks, they magically seem to transform the paintings from coloring book style to more of a finished painting look.


Okay, here is where things started to go horribly wrong. I have never painted water with gouache and it sure is not the same as with transparent watercolor! I will scrub this mess out for my next session and start again, probably with transparent watercolor. I also want to add some rocks, the water was cascading over some of the larger rocks in the river and I guess I forgot that when drawing and painting. I wanted the river to be the center of attention in this painting, but not because it is so badly-done that it draws the eyes there!

I hesitated to show you this iteration, but if I am going to maintain my artistic integrity while showing WIPs, I need to show you the uh-oh iterations as well. So, here it is for now, once I survive the Oktoberfest art show on Saturday I will need to get back to this with my Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and start making that look more like water. I did not use wet-in-wet techniques with the gouache, which in my mind is the main problem with my water, and may practice with a little gum arabic and gouache on another sheet of paper to see what I can do to make that flow together better and look more like water. This is an example of why I like taking WIP photos as I go along....the mistakes announce themselves better than if I just looked at the painting and wondered what was wrong with it. It is sort of like having someone else critique it from a photo, you notice things you did not notice when staring at the painting.