watercolour sky - exploring colours, composition, ideas

One of my goals for this year is to paint bigger, but that's a big jump for me. So I'm taking baby steps, by preparin in my usual way, with a few sketches, thumbnails, value studies, colour studies, all of which I promptly forget when I start painting! But as procrastination goes, it's productive enough.

For this one, the original idea is a sweeping view of the mountains on the Beara peninsula. One of these views that will take your breath away. And there's only room for one car to pull up. So if someone's already there, you're out of luck.

My first difficulty is often trying to define what I'm trying to capture, the story, the "what". It must be something with my brain, but I find it hard to "reduce" what I have seen and felt into one word. I want it all - the sky, the mountains, the road, the meadows, the smell of the sea, the feeling of the sun on my face, or the breeze that's pushing the clouds from the West. Maybe I should stop trying to put it into words, and let the process of drawing and painting help me re-discover that feeling. I know from experience that the sky is always important to me, but in an Irish landscape, it's half sky and half mountains, or sea.

While doing these studies, I did re-discover, though, that Vanadium yellow is amazing for that fresh-green-grass-hit-by-a-ray-of-sunshine feeling!

And here is my first attempt at painting this - I wanted a long landscape format, so I used masking tape, and then I thought that I could use the extra space for an extra version of the sky. Maybe that's an idea?

And then, I felt the blue mountains were not prominent enough, and I had lost the curve of the road, so here is another sketchbook exploration. A completely different feeling, where I've cropped the left part of the mountains off altogether. These blue mountains are amazing by the way. I don't know anything about geology, but you can see the folded layers of rock in these mountains!

And then, how to introduce detail in the foreground without losing the sense of vastness that matters so much to me! Back to the masters: "Every brush stroke counts" - Marc Taro Holmes!

In other words, I'm nowhere near done exploring!