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God's recipe for spectacular:

- Ten parts rugged rocky mountain

- Three parts glacier

- Seven parts debris slopes

- Four parts northern evergreens

- One glacial lake of impossible color

Create Rocky Mountains over, say, six or seven hundred million years (it's like a day to you). Throw in some ice ages to taste. After sufficient glacial events to get everything just so, wait, oh, say, 12000 years. Invite tourists. 

Continuing the theme from my last blog entry, the amazing teal and turquoise glacial waters of the Canadian Rockies simply must be seen to be believed.

Continuing a theme of many of these bog entries over the past few years, watercolor can be a bitch to work with.

Seriously, I can't tell you how many of my fellow artists just hate it. Refuse to work in it. Ah, but it is the challenge that matters. Remember the scene in A League of Their Own when the Geena Davis character quits and tells the Tom Hanks coach character that it all just got too hard. Tom Hanks snarls in reply something to the effect that if it were easy everybody would do it. "The 'hard' is what makes it great." That is watercolor in a nutshell.

There are two primary reasons for watercolor's challenge and allure. The one that drives most people crazy but doesn't bother me in the least is the way colors bleed into one another and go bonkers when you are heavy into the wet onto wet zone. The second, less obvious at first, and hardest thing to come to grips with is that it dries several tones lighter than it looks when the brush hits the paper. So you end up hitting it again, and it still doesn't look right when it dries. So you hit it again, and, too late, you've got ugly on your paper and no amount of anything you do can fix the problem. This is especially onerous when you are mixing blue, white, and a tad bit of yellow to achieve the teal of a glacial lake.

This has become my white whale.  

Moraine Lake, just outside of Lake Louise, is God's recipe for spectacular highlighted by a perfect vantage point captured in billions of photographs. On a partly cloudy day when the sun peaks out and then hides, the lake water shows more shades and intensities of blue green glow than the spectrum can possibly hold. It is amazing, and soul stirring and dang near impossible to replicate in watercolor. This painting, another study, is a case in point. What looked like teal when applied to the paper dried to boring blue. What looked like teal when I tried to fix the problem dried to even less interesting blah. After the third wash, failure was complete and I gave up on the lake. The mountains and other whatnot were fun to paint, although this is a style I think lends itself more to oil than to watercolor. Too garish. If salvaged by anything, it is the whimsy. But to me, this is one for the reject pile.

Stay tuned. The hard is what makes it worth it.