Seeing the Big Shapes, Painting the Details

It's an overcast October day in Rhinecliff, New York and I want to paint this street scene in gouache.



(Link to YouTube) Even with a straightforward scene like this, I have to remember to think about the big shapes and not get lost in the details, or as they say in the Tao Te Ching, the 10,000 things.



One way to see the simple tones of a scene is to photograph the scene and put a photo of the scene through a Photoshop filter, such as Filter / Artistic / Cutout or the Poster Shine app.

I use the following pigments of watercolor and gouache in tubes:

Sap Green

Yellow ochre

Lemon yellow

Pyrrol red

Terra rosa

Raw umber 

Ultramarine blue

Titanium white
Jeanette is using a Stillman and Birn sketchbook