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Remember how I messed up my first attempt to paint a Kubota Gardens landscape?  Of course you do.  It was green.  WAY too green.  So many trees!  So many shrubs!  Just a massive mess of greenery and the thing is, that's what's there in the original photographs.  Lots of green.  It's a very green place because hey, it's a garden.

My mistake in the painting was to paint what was there.  This often works, and is, in fact, one of the "rules" of the Urban Sketchers manifesto -- "Paint what you see!"  No making stuff up, no popping in an elf where there isn't one.  No painting shrubs blue when they are green.

However, I am a firm believer in artistic license, though not to the point of adding elves to my paintings.  Really it is just selectivity -- carefully picking and choosing what to put in and what to leave out or de-emphasize.  And I'm definitely still trying to master that skill.  It's tricky!  I want to draw and paint everything in the scene, when I ought to be emphasizing a focal point.  I remind myself of this all the time, and then when I paint the actual picture, completely forget about it.  Perhaps if I tied a string around my pinky as a reminder?  Does that ever work?

Anyway, the past few days I returned to my tried and true method of a pen drawing with watercolor on three Kubota Garden scenes, and they made me happier, despite the fact that I forgot about focal points again.  There is green, but not as much green.  So here they are -- and now I am going to go find a piece of string.

And remember -- you can click on a picture to make it bigger!  Always fun!