With a week of rainy weather, I wanted to paint something that reminded me of summer storms. Specifically, the sight and smell of rain on wet pavement, a nostalgic smell. When I scrolled past the images below, I was inspired to mash them together because they just seemed to agree:
As usual, I just ran across these images on at some point and loved them enough to save them. For some reason when I saw these two images as I scrolled through my collection, they seemed to go together!
I started out with a tonal watercolor underpainting in bright pink. This seemed like a good base, since I wanted to present cyan, yellow, and magenta as my primary colors. I wanted to try to put a color twist on my classic red, yellow, blue source material.
I took a couple of process photos along the way, to get a good look at how things developed:
I could keep going with the “finishing touches”, forever and ever. As a sketchbook page that was painted over a few morning warm-ups, I’m really happy with how this turned out! I love everything about this gouache-over-watercolor technique right now, so stay tuned for more of that soon.