Watercolor Painting Sunrise over The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains, Australia

Sunrise over The Three Sisters, Blue Mountians, Australia

Here is my latest watercolour painting. I think the title tells you all about it really. I particularly like this type of scene and feel it is just made for watercolour. It is mostly a wet on wet painting with warm and cool colours flowing into one another. The dark silhouette of the three sisters helps add to the feeling of space in the painting. As soon as I saw the scene I new I had to paint it!

The Three Sisters are a rock outcrop in the Blue Mountains, just outside of Sydney, Australia.

The painting’s dimensions are 56cm x 18 cm. It was painted on Arches Cold Press, 300 g.s.m. paper.

At some point I will post it as a demonstration on my Painting With Watercolors website, but not for a while as I need to wrap up a few other projects first.

Happy painting,

Joe

Grose River, Yarramundi, NSW

Watercolor landscape painting of the Grose river, Yarramundi, NSW

I painted this watercolor from a photo I took of this scene earlier this year. One week after taking the photo I visited the same location to do some plein air painting and the whole area was flooded from recent rains which made for quite a different painting.

I was mainly inspired to paint this because of the way the river meandered into the distance.

This watercolor painting was done on a quarter sheet of Arches 300 gsm rough paper.

Happy painting,

Joe

www.paintingwithwatercolors.com

Watercolor Tip #9

The Importance of your Under Wash

If the under wash, which is usually the first wash you put on your painting surface, is not correct tonally, your landscape painting will not work as well as it should.



I usually paint my sky and ground in my first wash. At this point my painting should already look like a landscape and it will be relatively easy to put all of the remaining objects in my painting and have them feel like they belong there.


When you paint the land component of your under wash it should be lighter in tone, have softer edges and be cooler (color’s lean towards blue) in the distance and stronger in tone, sharper and warmer (colors lean towards red and yellow) in the foreground. This is what is called atmospheric perspective and is caused by the air (water vapour, pollution, dust, other molecules, etc) that you look through to see distant objects.

Once the under wash is totally bone dry then you can go back and place the objects within it eg, hills, trees, buildings, animals etc.  Obviously the same rules of atmospheric perspective apply to these objects placed on your landscape.  However, as they will primarily be vertical shapes (hills, trees, buildings, people, they will usually be of a stronger tone than the horizontal ground on which they are placed.

 
Happy Painting
Joe
www.watercolordemos.com