This painting has been haunting my mind for years:

This is by Oleg Kozak, a Ukrainian watercolor artist who unfortunately passed away in November, 2017. This man had the ability to capture light in a way that I haven�t seen in many other painters.

I decided to try to look deeper into his paintings to see if I could learn a bit about how he managed to capture light with such mastery. So I looked him up and grabbed a few photos of his to look at.

Studying these (and several others) I came to identify a few tactics that I think he employed.

First: he didn�t paint a sky. He left the white paper to read as a blinding white sky, and it worked.

Then I think he painted light yellows and oranges with a wet in wet light bloom.

After that dried, it looks like he painted a his mid tones in a single pass, constantly changing pigment, and forever connecting shapes.

If I�m right, he then finished with some darks in much the same way, only much much more constrained.

So to might I decided to try my hand at what I think his techniques might have been.

Clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement. Here�s my painting:

After looking again, I can see room to push darker values in the canopy. And, I can try to mask off some areas. I don�t think Oleg Kozak used making fluid in all of his paintings, but I�m pretty sure he used it in some of them. So I�ll give it a shot in my next attempt.