Looking for inspiration...

At the moment, I am looking for inspiration. When I find it I will begin my next painting plus post this page.

I am thinking about a "4 by," my name for it, where I use a sheet of watercolor paper and tape it off into four individual but smaller paintings. Then, I paint all four at the same time.

What intrigues me is to make them a family of paintings, similar subject matter, color, lighting, treatment or some combination of those characteristics. And I think that I want to make them landscapes.

First, as shown on the right, I taped off the watercolor paper into four images.

I then mixed with much water a spot of Cadmium Red, a spot of Cadmium Yellow and a very liberal dose of Cerulean Blue (in this instance a spot is about the size of a match's head and a liberal dose is four times that.) I washed this mixture from bottom to top adding water as the wash flowed.

Then to the mixture above, I added about three spots of Yellow Ocher and washed in the foreground paying attention to the soft edge that I believe will become a tree line.

Working very wet-on-wet (sopping wet), I pushed and pulled this mixture back and forth with no apparent purpose. Mainly, I was just getting some variety of values, still very light.

Lastly, with just clean clear water, I slopped areas into the top portion of the frames to break the clean smooth, almost-not-there blue portion which may become the sky.

My best bet is to get another color working and see what happens. On to Step 4.