Watercolor Painting of Baritones Part 3

I started a painting of my son playing the marching baritone with his high school band in May of this year, 2014. I finished the painting in July of this year. I realized, while looking through some of my blog posts, that I never showed the final steps of the painting. Part One and Part Two are available if you click on the following links: Watercolor Painting of Baritones Part 1 and Watercolor Painting of Baritones Part 2. 

Baritone Painting LWatry© 2014

In the first two images you can see that I have started working on the instruments to give them a shiny, metallic feeling. The way to do this is to paint the things that are reflected in the surface. So, I look for all the changes of color and value and I also include the places that look shiny white to help with the illusion. Since this is a marching band, they were warming up outside and so there is sky and trees and other things reflected in the metal surfaces.

I continued to work on each of the instruments. There were a lot of abstract pieces in them as well as distorted reflections. The painting is mostly a cool value painting with lots of blues and greens, so I wanted to highlight the oranges and skin tones that I found reflected in the horns and on the figures skin. I tried a variety of grays and ended up mixing small containers of my favorites. I found a new mix that I really liked - Italian burnt sienna and French ultramarine blue make a great gray.  

Even though I was working on the horns a lot at this stage, I kept going back to the skin tones in my sons face and those visible on the other musician's arm and neck. Because I now had a lot more values from dark to light in the painting, I could more accurately judge the skin tones to see if they needed adjustments.

"Fanfare" watercolor by LWatry©2014

Here is the final painting. I love the way the layering of the horns and gloved hands looks. I wanted the foreground horns to be less in focus, so I softened the edges with a damp brush after I finished them. I decided to title the painting "Fanfare" and I think it makes a great memory of my sons time in the Liberty High School marching band!