TOM WILLS PRODUCTIONS: No. 337, "Three and One"

No. 337, "Three and One" watercolor

This painting is SOLD!

It may be surprising to learn that the paint color used most in No. 337, "Three and One," is yellow. I went through two packs of yellow watercolor in reproducing this peaceful countryside.

Yellow, you see, is the perfect blender. It brightens greens, lightens browns, makes whites less harsh and provides a good transition between light and dark spaces.
Truly the only place yellow doesn't work is in the sky.

There is a lot of blending going on in this image, and it's not all in the paint. Take a good look: There's a road cutting through the scenery, with a guardrail and highway signs. There are utility poles and wires strung across the trees. A fence has been erected to hold back the traffic but to keep in the four horses: Three socialites and one loner.

What is striking about this place is that the human footprints upon the land have not substantially altered its beauty. A person can stand at that fence and see for miles.
In fact, that's precisely what I did, and how I felt, at the start of summer. I snapped a phone picture of this green place from a driveway, as I was getting into my car to head down that road. But I knew from that moment that I would transfer it to paints.

But I'm not going to tell you where it is. I thought about it, but it's not my place to do so, other than to say it's in Trumbull County, Ohio.
But I have been there a few times. I like visiting even though I know zero about horses, other than they are pretty -- and big.
Its isolation is, I believe, a necessity. This is about as natural as a place can get.
It's so very quiet.
It should stay that way.

The real thing.

About the painting:

"Three and One" began untitled and at first was an ink rendering. Of course I always intended to color it, but I wanted the horses and fences and railings, as well as the tree skeletons, to stand out. It's such a bright scene but the sun created deep and dark shadows -- so dark that they required inking.

The next step was a watercolor wash of blues, browns and greens -- plus yellow!

The sky actually remained simply that first watercolor wash, with the exception of some tinkering with the white clouds. The watercolor blues soaked into the paper and created a rippled, mottled effect that is accidentally cloud-like. So I didn't fuss with it.

The tree line was another matter entirely: It took four days to flesh out those tall trees They are a mixture of black, blues, greens, browns -- and yellows. I watered down white acrylic paint and added some blue to create the illusion of skylight between the branches, using a very fine brush.

The grasses also benefited from the rippling and mottling of the watercolor yellow, green, brown and blue into the paper. This created the effect of terrain, which I added to with other brush strokes to create grasses, rocks, dirt and wood. Maybe even some manure!

The horses were last to be finished. I went over that black ink with black paint, then red, then brown, and then white -- to create the look of shiny bodies and smooth out their shadows. Really the shadows were a blessing, simplifying the drawing while at the same time creating a central visual to draw the eye.