Tale of Two Paintings

I'm taking a watercolor painting class from Tom Hoffman and must miss class tomorrow, so decided to  post this week's work here. (I had to photograph the paintings using a flash tonight. Ich!)

The first painting below is a sketch for our homework assignment, which is to simplify a complex scene. The scene I chose was a photo I took of houseboats on Lake Union. To simplify it, I left out most of the details and made the background misty, using the method described in Lesson 10 of Carl Schmaltz' book, Watercolor Lessons from Eliot O'Hara. The misty approach worked pretty well, and I'm looking forward to using it in a more formal painting of the same scene.

The original photo is quite complex

Here's a radically simplified painted version

The second painting is of a barn I saw outside of Leavenworth. I made Bill stop the car and turn around so I could grab a photo of it. As you can see, I didn't do anything to simplify the painted version because it was already quite simple. At first I thought the picture was about the barn, but I soon realized that, for me at least, it's really about the wonderful blue tree shadow.