Portable Boiler

We spent Monday morning at the South Park City historical museum in Fairplay, Colorado, a place where Jeanette and I sketched over 30 years ago.

I liked the Steampunk spirit of rust, rivets, and spokes of this portable boiler, used by 19th century miners to operate the rock crushing machines.

I painted the study in gouache, with a few accents of colored pencil and fountain pen. Gouache is well suited to this sort of detailed study of a machine, because of the way you can paint light details over dark.

The dried paint surface of gouache also accepts touches from the water-soluble colored pencils, where casein doesn't so well.