Aerial Perspective, "Flores"

Since I love color and texture in my watercolor paintings, I often forget about aerial or atmospheric perspective.  I'm working on a painting where the city and water reflections will be bold in color; the water is intended to contain the focal point. I fear that using my normal very bold colors throughout the painting will end up causing the painting to lose focus, so I spent some time looking at work by Joseph Zbukvic and Thomas W. Schaller. They are experts at soft muted paintings. I felt following their example might keep me from losing aerial perspective in this painting.  I remember, when I first took watercolor classes, being told my paintings needed more aerial perspective.  My struggle with this has continued for years in many of my landscapes.  I get so wrapped up and excited by the color that - before I know it-  things that are supposed to be in the distance have too much color to appear distant.

To help me control this tendency I printed segments of Zbukvic's paintings.  I will keep these printouts by my side as I paint and hope they will remind me of my goal.   The picture in this blog is a small segment of the painting of the furthest back building and hills.  I think I'm heading in the right direction.  

Many people just add blues in the distant areas.  I wanted more variety in my painting so in addition to using more blues in the hills I added lavender and just a hint of a golden glow.  In fact I put down the golden glow first so some brightness still showed through the haze.  Lots of water provided the look of fog.  At this point it looks very dreamy as if fairies could fly out of the trees and dance across the sky.  I hope I can maintain this appearance as the painting progresses.

I'll post updates as the painting develops.

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