Sneak Peak at My Newest Painting

Here is a little sneak peak at the newest painting that I am working on. A couple of months ago, my husband was kind enough to take me on an autumn drive through the farmlands around Madison. There was this extraordinary red barn out in a field of corn and I absolutely loved the colors and the contrast. I knew I wanted to paint this scene, but I had to mentally mull it over first. Once all my mulling was finished, I had two different images in my mind and so I decided to create two small watercolor studies of the scene.

This was my first attempt. I put in a cool sky and played with texture and brushstrokes in the foreground. While I liked this one, I found a few compositional and color scheme problems with it and so I moved on to my second attempt.

This attempt was much more successful. I kept the entire piece on the warm side of the palette, using the white of the paper to achieve the brightness of the barn roof. The composition is much stronger in this painting, as the barn is not so close to the middle of the paper. I left the foreground simple, allowing the wet-on-wet paint to spread itself. Also, I made the sky warm this time, more of a yellow instead of the bright blue that seemed to throw everything off balance. The actual finished painting is going to be done in oil on canvas. But creating these little watercolor sketches really helped me to visualize the finished painting and work out some of the problems beforehand.