For Easter we went on a cycle trip to Tuscany. We stayed at Airbnb Castello di Badia in Poggibonsi. The landscape and the surrounding towns like San Gimignano, Volterra and Monteriggioni are amazing and cycling on the old pilgrimage road “Via Francigena” offers some stunning views (and some evil uphill battles 😉 but this castle where we stayed was absolutely magical. I Had to draw the well and found a bright sunny spring day to spend hours playing with this project. I think it’s the first time I let a drawing actually fill up a double spread in my sketchbook:
And after having painted with watercolor and colored pencils – and a bit of post scan editing to fix the center of the book crease:
The sketchbook is not really made for watercolor and it shows in how much the paper is buckling when wet. But even though that is in some ways annoying, painting on this rather cheap paper in an actual sketchbook also has a certain gritty charm to it that I really like. That said it could be interesting to repaint this on real watercolor paper too just to see the difference. Here is the well from a slightly different angle:
