Waterfall in Watercolor

Waterfall

Third day of my Daily Painting challenge! This time I decided to go for my Daniel Smith watercolors. I love the rich intensity of their hues and the transparency of Quinacridone Burnt Orange. I've been using that much more often than my old standby, Burnt Sienna, because it's so completely clear and transparent.

Working from the same photo as yesterday's Dawn Waterfall, I interpreted it at a different time of day in a completely different mood. Reserving white for the foam was a lot of fun, so was swirling my brush loosely in the water texture below the waterfall.

I don't usually sketch under watercolor paintings. I prefer to do that with the paint, so the graphite lines don't show through the transparent color. I know that's a bit of a purist approach but it's something satisfying when I can show something in the paint alone and work that expressively. I used a size 12 round brush, the biggest round brush I had available - happily because it's so pointed a round, I had no need to turn to a smaller brush for any of it.

The background trees are wet in wet, first I washed the sky area with water, then with blue and then started painting trees into it letting them diffuse into the sky colors. That was a great success. I'll have to do some more wet in wet paintings before I finish this series of 120 paintings.