Post Office #1 - Huttig, Arkansas

Huttig Arkansas Post Office

At the end of 2022, I decided I'd observed watercolor long enough and needed to start painting.  Using watercolor wasn't new to me, but I was always amazed at how terrible my paintings could be.  So, I took a break.  For about 30 years.    

But in 2022 I ordered a cheap set of watercolors in a little aluminum box advertised on Instagram. I decided to start with small modernist post offices, which offered both variety and simplicity.  Heck, they were already sketches. And when you work small, you can fail and try again pretty easily.  I tracked down a bunch of post offices in Google Street View, cropped and corrected for perspective, and printed them at a scale that seemed reasonable.  Usually 3" x 5", but sometimes a bit larger or smaller. Transfer paper allowed me to get accurate outlines, which I corrected in pencil and finalized with a pen.

My first post office was in Huttig, Arkansas.  With a limestone panel, a curtain wall filled with panes of greenish glass, and a flat aluminum canopy, it was perfect.  Not the painting; that was terrible.  I added some landscaping and the US flag to anchor the image.  But it still feels a bit empty.  Every post office has identifying signage, and unfortunately, I'm terrible at lettering.  Instead, I scanned the painting (ok, it was an iPhone photo) and added the text in Photoshop.  And while I was in Photoshop, maybe I should correct the color and add some texture? This was a mistake that I repeated again and again.  It made me think I could fix things when I just needed to move on to the next.