watercolor and gouache sketch
The end of the summer, around the time when kids normally return to school for classes, has always felt particularly nostalgic to me. Maybe it’s because my birthday sometimes landed right, square on the first day of school.
My favorite thing about summer, and one of the things that I still feel most nostalgic about, is going for a swim. Although I myself can usually be found paddling around in a lake, last week I decided that a scene with river bathers would be a good subject for a timed painting exercise.
I spent two timed hours on this page, plus about one miscellaneous hour of extra fussing, where I tried to make the darkest colors really stand out.
On the facing page, I couldn’t help using the brush-cleaning space for a large, generalized study of who I think is one of the most interesting figures in the reference photo – the planes of a man’s back and shoulders with his face and forearms turned away in deep (vibrant) shadow.
In keeping with the theme, this is the last page of this sketchbook, and today I cracked the spine on a brand new one. Filling up one sketchbook and moving on to a new one is, in my opinion, one of the top 5 most satisfying things in the world.