Irish Cliffs

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Later this year I will be teaching a watercolor class about painting scenes in Ireland so I painted this as a prelude. It was the perfect opportunity to paint with different greens and see how they worked with other colors and I couldn't resist including a pink sky. I remember reading how much Claude Monet enjoyed putting green and pink next to each other when painting in his gardens in Giverny. This pink is repeated along with violet in the foreground flowers and this encloses the painting from the top and the bottom.

Color temperature is an important part of this landscape and the warm and cool greens help flatten the land leading up to the cliffs. Even the darkest colors are deep shades of perylene green and olive green mixed with French ultramarine blue. Some of the color temperature is painted at random but in general you can see the greens getting warmer as they come forward.

Creating different shapes in the land was also necessary for interest in such a large flat area and you can see all the different shapes vary in size and value. I confess that I was getting tired of painting greens so adding the flowers on the foreground hill was a welcome relief. Saving the little bits of white paper for the flowers was tedious but worth it and I also saved unpainted white paper for the surf. Also, for Tom Nobel fans, I included some white sheep grazing in the distant meadow.

The water is a combination of cerulean blue and a tiny bit of rose dore and the most distant land formation is a combination of perylene green and burnt sienna. All the greens are mixtures of olive, perylene, cerulean blue and lemon yellow. The gray cliffs were painted with cerulean blue and brilliant orange and the flowers were painted with cobalt violet and rose dore. Ireland presents the artist with an amazing number of painting possibilities and I look forward to the class at the Art Students League of Denver. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton