Reading Time: Watercolor Painting #8 18" x 24"

Reading Time is my eighth painting since taking up watercolors with a professional seriousness.  I must have close to thirty hours in this now, spanning right around three weeks.  Since this is closer to completion I will make no attempts to catch all of you up from the white piece of paper I started on.  What I will do is give you a short run down of this stage.

For the most part I have tried to work back to front, light to dark.  I do tend to wander around the painting and work on sections that seem to beg for the brush.  The watch is the central focus and I isolated it with tape and colorless masking fluid (Winsor & Newton) so I could drop in the big swath of green that is the book War of the Jewels by J.R.R. Tolkien.  After several layers and days of working the green, I pulled all the tape and masking off and went back in around the book deepening the values of the shadows and  most  of the lower left hand of the painting.

Finally I worked up enough courage to drop in the shadows of the pocket watch, using more Hookers Green mixed in with Indanthrene Blue.  I was worried about the reflected yellows I needed to get in over the greens just south of the watch and figured this would turn to mud if I made any attempt to lay in some yellows over the green layers. Fortunately I used Naples Yellow which is pretty opaque and had good coverage on top of the green.  So far so good there.

I will continue to build up the south side of the watch and darken the lines around it. I hope to finish that section and move back to the chain by tomorrow night.  Lastly the watch face and lid will finish this piece.  I will post more photos once I get to this stage.