Painting Light and Shadows in Piazza Marconi, Vernazza

Bright Mediterranean light always creates incredible opportunities for painting strong shadow patterns across colourful buildings. In this piece of Piazza Marconi in Vernazza, the strong sun hits the tall Italian houses and casts deep, rich darks right across the square. My main focus here was to capture that big contrast between the warm, sunlit walls and the cooler shadow areas resting in front of them.

To get the warm Italian feeling, I used a wash of cadmium yellow and burnt sienna across the bright facades. When painting the deep shadows under the awnings and along the harbour floor, I mixed cobalt blue with neutral tint. This allowed me to keep the dark areas clean and luminous without looking muddy or flat.

Small details like the yellow and blue boats sitting in the foreground really help pull the whole scene together. Notice how the crisp cobalt blue and yellow boat covers pop against the light harbour surface. A few dark brush strokes for the figures in the square bring simple life and scale to the architecture.

Working fast on a scene like this keeps the watercolour fresh and fluid. It is easy to get lost in every single window, but keeping the shapes simple gives the painting much more energy. I left the light foreground clean so your eye moves easily from the boats up into the colourful town square.