I decided to try painting shadows in the snow with the watercolour pens because I have been liking the vibrancy that I can get with the pens. I really should be able to get that level of vibrancy with my regular paints. It makes me think that I actually don’t know how to paint with watercolours. Maybe using the pens will teach me some tricks that I can use with my regular paints.

It was a bit tricky trying to lighten them enough to look like shadows. I ended up doing two paintings because the first one (below) got a bit too dark and crazy. I think I may benefit from slowing down with these pens–since I was working from life and the shadows were changing I think I was trying to paint a bit too quickly. And looking at the paintings now, they are nearly identical to my first front yard painting with watercolours from last week. Maybe I should have just worked from that first front yard watercolour instead of painting from life. Maybe I’ll try that next.

I also find it interesting that I only used two pens and a brush to do these paintings. Usually when I paint I tend to do a lot of colour mixing so it’s weird for me to just use a straight blue and brown. Though I am really loving how it feels like using sharpies. It is like the perfect marriage between painting and sketching.