February Skies and Clouds

I've returned to gouache this month, as well as skies and clouds, one of the subjects I love most in the Southwest landscape.

These were all painted on a paper that's new to me, Fluid Watercolor Hot Press Block. Each painting is 2.5" x 3.5". I wanted a good hard, smooth paper. This block does the trick quite well. Hot press paper allows the paint to remain on top of the paper, not soaking in as quickly as a cold press paper does. That means that the strokes are more evident, the mixes flowing more where the paint is thinner (or when I used transparent watercolor), giving a rather more painterly look that I like.



Recently the clouds were so spectacular over Sandia, the mountain range on the east side of Albuquerque, that I snapped a few photos. This one was perfect for my first experiment with this paper:

I took this shot along 1-40 west of Albuquerque somewhere. A blue sky day, with few clouds, it was fun to play with transparent watercolor for the sky, then work the clouds and land plane in gouache:

I used a photo taken from the west mesa for the sky, cloud and mountain in this one, then made up the foreground from imagination and memory. I like the scale I achieved here:

Here's the new paper, which is a 4' x 6" block that's glued on the long sides only, and two of my paintings done in it. I remove the page, and then cut the paintings down to the standard ATC size, 2.5" x 3.5".