Ok so this time I have a post for the WIPS of my painting of the Pisgah Covered Bridge. When I was younger, my family and I went to many covered bridges. My mom has a real liking of them and I never passed up a chance to get close to water (yeah im odd). Anyways one of my favorites that I remember going to was the Pisgah Covered Bridge. So I decided to paint it and then give it as a present to my mom for her birthday (awesome artist son right!?). So here goes the creative process of this work.
First I worked from a picture my mom took long ago. I unfortunately don’t have a digital version of that picture, but you can google to find some images of the bridge. I started off with a real nice, light, and detailed line drawing of the bridge. I then started right away with the wood work on the bridge.
I used a combination of Prussian Blue and Chinese Orange watercolors to achieve the nice aged wood look. It is all about layers in my work. I start with the dark layers, putting a light base where they will be. Then I put more layers on them and the next darkest areas. I keep laying washes of blues and oranges to get the colors just right and add that bit of randomness that is in the old wood.
I then started on the water.
Normally the bridge didn’t have this much water under it, but hey this is my painting so I did what I wanted. Once again all about slow adding of layers to build up value and color.
Started adding grass. I would end up constantly adding more and more texture and layers to the grass throughout the entire painting process.
Added the roof and tress. I removed a lot of the unsightly marks of time from the bridge, but left the natural effects of time. I heard the bridge used to be red but I have always known it as this so I kept with its true color, just minus the graffiti.
Ok now we are getting somewhere! first wash of trees put in and the rest of the river. Unfortunately this is a turning point in the painting. I really liked it at this point, but since the very beginning I had planned on putting leaves in the foreground of the painting with acrylic paint. This gave me a lot of trouble as I was not as experienced at this. I had a really hard time, and ended up have to do some serious fixing on the piece because I put too much to fast and almost covered up the bridge! Luckily I did manage to fix it but I still feel it isn’t quite as good as it was before the foreground leaves.
The more finished picture coming soon!