Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Two Cloud Sketches




watercolour/gouache 15x10cm

Now that our windows are scaffold-free, quick sky studies are a pleasant distraction from slogging away at the Works in Progress. A lot of them end up overworked and messy, but these two are quite lean and clear.

They are on grey A4 from the local stationers – cut into quarters and used unstretched. The grey allows the white gouache highlights to work much better; on white paper, they can appear slightly yellow.

Viewing images on the computer usually flatters them, but that’s not the case here. The play between transparency and opacity doesn’t really come across – seen ‘live’, they fizz a lot more.

Which is, after all, how it should really be.