Day 26: Look Up!

Day 26: Look Up!

One of the best parts of living in a city is looking up, especially in Rome. Romans loved to build larger than life temples, causing us to feel tiny, even in their aftermath some 2,000 years later.

In today’s painting, done at the Theater of Marcellus, I wanted to give the sense of looking up at the columns, the remainder of a Roman temple.

Temple Ruins
Watercolor on Paper
11 x 5.5″
$115 | Available
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There were a few lessons in today’s painting.

The first was remember to bring a ruler! I know that sounds so boring and uptight, but in drawing long straight lines in architecture, it really does help to have a ruler to make the structure more solid and therefore believable.

The second lesson was to use more paint than I think. Different watercolor papers behave differently, but they all absorb water and paint and therefore dries lighter than when you first apply the paint. Specifically here I could have given the sky a little more punch to make the columns more important and to give them the feeling of towering above.

Still, this was a really fun painting to make, mostly because it was a silent afternoon in the middle of the ruins, a gray day and I am not sure that many people know that you can walk right down in here and feel small among giants.