During our vacation, I was able to do many paintings of Greece. The Greek Cyclades each have their own personality. Ios impressed me in many ways. The sunsets here are fantastic, the island lights up during golden hour, and the white walls turn pearly.
The main town of Ios is a spectacular tangle of white houses. Nested within each other, the eye is easily lost. A magical, spectacular city.
This watercolor of Ios was painted facing the city, sitting in the shade of one of the island’s windmills. The terraces in the foreground are the privileged place of the many Greek cats who live here year round and bask in the sun.
Architecture and vegetation
After a few hours at the beach, I sat on the terrace of one of the many cafes on Mylopotas beach, on the Isle of Ios to do this watercolor. This allowed me to take a close look at the Greek architecture so characteristic of the Cyclades. Houses nested one in the other between which runs a relatively sparse vegetation. Succulents, cacti and palm trees give an exotic color to these immaculate white buildings.
The white Fabriano paper with a fine texture thus gives the necessary relief to densify these urban landscapes made in watercolor.
This is the type of exercise that I like to practice regularly in character drawing and life scenes. I try to take advantage of any quiet moment to sit down and pull out my sketchbook. The people waiting for the bus were a perfect alibi so I could draw them in Indian ink, then quickly color them with watercolors. As they did not move, it allowed me to be able to observe them at leisure and to paint this watercolor in the Cyclades, in the heart of Greece.