Last Glow Of Sunset

I was aiming for a tonalist look in this watercolor, using a number of glazes to achieve the result I wanted. It's easy to do too many glazes and ruin the painting by overworking it, or too few and not quite achieving one's goal. I'm a great admirer of the tonalist painters who mostly painted in oils. Tonalism was eventually eclipsed by impressionism and European modernism." I love trying to create atmosphere in my watercolors. The colors I used were quinacridone gold, brown madder, neutral tint, transparent pyrrol orange, Payne's grey and burnt umber. Also some sepia ink for the texture in the foreground.

Golden Sunset

I'm really enjoying practicing my abstract landscapes inspired by my new Ann Blockley book. For this watercolor I did a number of glazes using brown madder, burnt sienna, Indian yellow and cobalt blue - just mixing them on the paper with no definite plan at first. While the paint was still wet I dropped in a sprinkling of Schmincke Tro-Col-Bronze in light gold - it's a powdered gouache. You can see the shimmer of the gold dust in the sky area. I then painted in the trees with sepia ink which mixed with the gold dust giving the trees quite a nice halo effect.