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.