Untitled (1/52)

The final piece. Didn't work as expected but things were learned!

So I actually finished this painting on Thursday, but didn't get around to posting it until now. The inspiration for this landscape came from a photo of the Himalayas. This painting did not go as planned, this itself week was actually a disaster for reasons that will be apparent in the next post. For this one, I decided to try a more detailed painting. 

I was happy with my sketch so went to work and reached what should have been the end.

The thing about working with this kind of paper is that it takes on a rather drastically different appearance when it is wet. The paper becomes much more transparent when wet which makes all the paints much more saturated. After it dried I realized there was a big a problem. There was no clear distinction between the foreground and background which took away any sense of depth and made it all blend together. What I wish I had done was use much less texture on the background mountains and put some white space between it and the foreground with some fog perhaps. My options were limited but I decided to see if I could fix this since this is primarily suppose to be a learning experience. If my first painting was perfect that would sure put a lot of pressure on the rest! I actually tried three things, first putting a watered down ink wash on the back of the paper for the foreground elements to make them stand out more, then most obviously applied more blue to the foreground, and finally I added some white highlights to the foreground on the back of the paper. While it helped, I was not really happier with the result. But, at this point there was really nothing else to do so it was time to take what I learned and move on to the next.