I had a problem–I painted a watercolor painting that I’ve come to realize I don’t like. In it, I’d tried to show the bright midday sun and cool blue shadows, but it didn’t turn out the way I’d wanted it to. I thought about trying to somehow fix it (nearly impossible with watercolors), but a bigger problem was that I’d had it turned into prints. They’re small (4×6) prints, made to sell at the place that I’d painted–Eckley Miners’ Village in Pennsylvania. This is one of the prints:

I used my photo below as a reference to paint from:

I was going through some of my art stuff this morning and came upon the stack of these prints. I once again thought about throwing them out and trying to paint the scene again, but then I had a different idea. What if I tweaked the colors on the prints? With something like color pencils?

I wondered how the print paper would take color pencils and thought that damaging the prints was a very real possibility. But what did it matter? They were relatively inexpensive, and I was thinking about tossing them out anyway. So I took the top print, got out my Prismacolor pencils and started coloring. I used warmer colors, because in some of my earlier photos of Eckley, a lot of the houses were painted red. Below is the result:

The color pencils worked just fine on the print paper, I’m happy to report. I’m glad I used them–I think they make the scene feel more vibrant. Who knows, maybe I’ll sell a print or two now.

Only nineteen more prints to go.