Teesta river flowing down the Yumthang valley

"There is something of the marvelous in all things of nature." Aristotle

When you stand there looking at the creation by nature, it overwhelms you and you begin to appreciate everything around more than ever.

While returning from Zero point ( Yumesamdong )  in North Sikkim, we came across this particular scene with Teesta river flowing down the Yumthang Valley, surrounded by white grey rocks, a sandy patch and greenery in the background. We stopped for a while here and spent few moments soaking in the beauty, then went ahead to click a few photographs.

Teesta river is a 309 km long river flowing through the Indian states of West Bengal and Sikkim, before going to Bay of Bengal through Bangladesh.It carves our from the verdant Himalayas in temperate and tropical river valleys and forms the border between Sikkim and West Bengal.
( Courtesy: Wikipedia )

I wanted to try out this scene in water colour medium and used a small cut out of Strathmore water colour paper ( 4" X 5" ). The river water was beautiful shades of blue and I have used a mix of Winsor and Newton ( Cotman colours ) and Camlin paints for this artwork.

Teesta River

Water colour study work on Strathmore paper

Size 4"X 5"

The rocky path in the foreground is the path through which most vehicles travel. It is a very bumpy ride. There used to be a road earlier which got destroyed in the past earthquake. Many parts of North Sikkim face the same situation, however the final destination is worth the ride.

I enjoyed painting on Strathmore 300 gsm water colour paper. It has good water retaining capacity and the paper does not abosrb the colours much. As a result the colours remain bright with minimum application. I am tempted to create some more works on this paper so as to know my final review in comparison to Arches and Fabriano papers.

Thanks a lot for visiting my blog. If you are into water colour painting, I would love to hear about the papers and colours used by you. Do leave in a comment to share the same.