Dec 6, 2016

Downtown Denver Watercolor Painting

Cityscapes are one of my favorite subjects and this is a painting of 17th Street in Downtown Denver. It is actually a mixed media painting because I used pastel along with watercolor. These two mediums work well together and I did the major work on the painting with watercolor and then put on some final touches with pastel to add texture.

This area of Denver is a favorite of mine and I have painted it several times in different weather conditions and different times of the day. The glass buildings display such wonderful reflections of the other buildings and they are always different. When I’m painting a city scape like this I am more interested in capturing the gritty feeling and the noise of the city than I am in painting a perfect architectural rendering of the buildings. I like the way the buildings seem to lean on each other and I decided which areas to emphasize and most important which details to leave out. 17th Street is almost always crowded with traffic but I kept it simple because I wanted the feeling of a more quiet Sunday morning.