Watercolors & Oils: Orvieto

Watercolors & Oils: Orvieto

For the past year I have been using watercolor as a new medium with a different approach and way of working from my oil paintings.

I travel a lot and sometimes it just is not practical for me to take my oil paints along, so watercolor has become the perfect alternative when I will be in a place for a short time.

I have also begun to use watercolor as a form of exploring ideas for potential oil paintings. If I see something that catches my eye, I take just a short time to make a sketch in watercolor of it. This helps me to study the composition, lighting, the drawing involved and by the end of a sketch I can already have a sense of whether or not I want to come back to the location and spend a day painting it in oils.

One of my recent examples is from a week-long visit to the Etruscan hill town of Orvieto.

Via delle Cave, Orvieto
5.5. x 10″
Watercolor and Pencil on Paper
SOLD

This is such and exciting view to me for so many reasons: the light, the composition of the streets going both up and down and looking through the buildings to the distant hills. This is the kind of place that I just love everything about it and feel compelled to capture.

I took a morning and sat at this busy intersection, taking the time to draw it out first with the challenging perspective, and then set to capturing the light and shadow shapes quickly. In looking at the watercolor the next day I decided it was indeed the perfect place to go back and paint a larger oil painting.

Via delle Cave, Orvieto

11 x 14″
Oil on Linen Panel
SOLD

In oils this took me several mornings of setting up my easel in the same spot. The light moves so quickly through the streets that I couldn’t get the canvas covered fast enough to capture it all at once.

This is a beloved spot in this picturesque town and many many tourists stopped to chat about how lovely Orvieto is and photograph this same spot themselves as a unique memory of the place. Personally I’d rather have a painting as a memory, one that will forever remind me of this unique place.