11/7/06


This is the periwinkle cottage I keep trying to paint. Yes, I know it isn't periwinkle. There isn't anything wrong with your monitor. I just couldn't bare to cover up that sparkling white.

Awhile ago I posted a photograph and a watercolor journal sketch of this cottage, and I was also working from a value sketch that I wanted to post, but just couldn't get a good image of it. I did it on the Bogus Rough sketch paper and that doesn't scan well, and I am getting a glare when I try to photograph it. The value sketches I work from are, I think, the most important reference tool I use. The accuracy in the details and the colors don't do as much for a painting as the contrasts of the lights and darks. Maybe that's just my opinion - maybe that's what works best for the kind of painting I want to do.

I was very frustrated with this painting - and a few other things in my life. It was wishy washy, the center of interest was not working. . . . I had some very dark paint in my brush and I thought it would feel good just to smear it all over the painting!!! But at the last minute I put a streak of dark down the left side of the tree trunks and then some darks in the background, dark in the windows, dark in the foreground foliage . . . Okay, I felt better then.

Some day I will paint this cottage again and I WILL paint it periwinkle. I guess it isn't just the color of the cottage that speaks to me, it's the setting and its attitude. Now I'm gonna work on mine.

2 comments:

ginny said...

Hi Catherine,
I like your painting. It seems to me you pulled it off nicely. I can't picture where the perriwinkle cottage is. Hope all is well with you.
Ginny

Catherine said...

Hi Ginny,
The cottage is along the stip at Memorial Gardens. It is on the highway, but we see the back of it from the garden.
I'm glad you like it - thanks.
Catherine