#30×30, 2025, Day 24: One Square Inch

8×8″ Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico 140lb Cold Press.

There was a small part of this little 8×8″ painting that I had to fuss over a few times – rewetting and lifting color, painting in with some diluted gouache, and then wetting again – I was dangerously close to overworking the paper in that one little spot.

Can you guess what is the most crucial one-square-inch of this painting?

Of course, it’s this spot dead center in the image, where the white path ends at the top of the hill, and the distant horizon is pushed back with the haze of atmospheric perspective.

This point of overlap is where you most feel the sense of imaginary distance between these two planes; the foreground hill and the distant mountains.

I want the viewer to imagine themselves walking up this path, standing at that cliff edge, and looking out at the vista. If I hadn’t fussed with the value here – where dark edge meets light – subtly tweaking the contrast right here – the feeling of depth can be lost.

I did also tweak this little white hook on the left (white gouache!) to suggest that it might visually join the larger white blob on the right, and give the impression there is a distant lake behind the hill.

And then, here are some of the rake-marks you can make with a nice sable brush, with the stiff natural hairs splayed out :)

This goes back to the point from the other day about brush-size properly scaling with painting size. If you go bigger, you need bigger brushes, and more paint – but if you TOO big, you are really switching into pouring territory!

So maybe it’s a red herring – all my recent talk about painting larger? I am very used to how watercolor bleeds and creeps at this size.

I think about wall-size paintings every day – because I honestly feel like my sketchbook-sized work just doesn’t have the necessary appeal for galleries or awards. Working small seems like a limitation for a ‘serious artists’. Whatever that means as an ’emerging artist’ at 58 years old :) I’m not sure I should even be worrying about it any more :)

So!

Going to have to leave it there for today!

Leave me some comments people! I hope some of you are still with us as we’re stumping into the last week of the #30x30DirectWatercolor marathon.

Or perhaps you’re reading this years later, after this event has become a well-respected annual tradition, and many of our regulars are now famous painters. Here’s your chance to revive the thread and make me think about the good old days :)

See you tomorrow!

~m