In My New Window

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I am in the process of moving into my new house and I picked some of the yellow flowers from my front yard, put them in a pitcher, and set them in my windowsill. Afternoon sunlight was shining through the west window lighting up the still life while creating cast shadows and evergreen trees in the yard provided a nice dark background to emphasize the flowers. I quickly set up my supplies and, finally painting again, among all the chaos it was fun and a welcome relief.

An accurate drawing was necessary because of the perspective in the windowsill. Because drawing moves you to the right side of your brain, it prepared me for painting. Starting with the yellow flowers, I painted back and forth between them and the white pitcher. This back and forth process assures the flowers and pitcher will relate to each other as they sit on the windowsill. All the angles and cast shadows on the windowsill were complicated so I tried to keep it simple by using only grays mixed with cerulean blue, cobalt violet and yellow ochre. Simplifying the value changes also helped. Cadmium yellow light, transparent yellow, and lemon yellow were used for the flowers and burnt sienna was used for their centers. Dropping one onto the windowsill added a shot of color in that area and created some nice cast shadows. Speaking of cast shadows, you can see how some of the yellow from the flowers dripped into the cast shadows on the windowsill and on the pitcher.

I cannot stress enough how important values are in painting. The pitcher appears round because the values change from unpainted white paper to middle values and finally to darker values all with a combination of hard and soft edges. The dark spots on the edge of the pitcher separate it from the windowsill and the dark greens where the stems enter the pitcher must be darker than the evergreen trees showing through the window. Both the stems and the evergreen trees were painted with the same olive green and perylene green so it is just the value changes that make the difference. Finally, the red trim on the rim of the pitcher added just the shot of color I was looking for and, the fact that red and green are compliments, made it work even better. While I was painting this I kept thinking of the quote by William Edward Medcalf "Take ordinary things and paint them in an extraordinary way." Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton