Farmers Market, El Cerrito Plaza

Please click here to enlarge.

I packed my little painting kit in my backpack and walked the mile up to El Cerrito Plaza after lunch to sketch at the Saturday farmers market. It was a rare sunny, warm day in this usually foggy, windy neighborhood. Unfortunately when I arrived I learned they would be closing in only 20 minutes. That was just long enough to stand and do most of the drawing, but not to paint. Time was cut even shorter by the various people who came over to see what I was doing and wanted to chat a bit. At 1:00 I took a few photos and headed back home with a pound of Peets Coffee Special Decaf beans.

I wish I could have painted at the Plaza because I knew exactly how I wanted to do it–very quick and fresh, with a light touch. But instead, sitting at my drawing table painting from the photos, I overworked it, eventually making one grand mistake (painting the background red since everything in the fruit stand had a red glow to it from the red shade structure–that is everything except the background which was NOT UNDER the structure–and clearly obvious in the photo!)

The red background looked awful, which gave me the chance to try out my bottle of Aquacover, which is like liquid paper but designed to work with and match different brands of watercolor paper. Supposedly you can use it to reclaim white areas in a watercolor painting without it being noticeable AND you can paint back over them. I used it to hide the red background and then, before it was quite dry, painted some green on top of it, which sort of blended in a bit instead of sitting on top. I think if I’d waited until it was dry, and had used it a little more thickly (I diluted it) it might just have worked better. I can tell that it would definitely work well for small areas without any problem. The Arches Bright White Aquacover matches the Moleskine watercolor notebook well.

Ink, watercolor and Creative Mark Aquacover in “Arches Bright White” in large watercolor Moleskine notebook.