Watercolour

On Friday, while at home for a day off work I decided to try my hand at watercolours. In part inspired by some of the work I had seen from my classmates, and in part inspired by the excellent watercolour website "handprint" and in part because of the opportunistic find of the book "Step-By-Step Guide to Painting Realistic Watercolors" by Dawn McLeod Heim, while I was in Christchurch recently visiting Scorpio Books.

Here, finally after several purchases of "how to paint watercolour" books I had found a book which passed on techniques in a way that only a proficient teacher can pass on - how to load a brush, how to blot a brush, how moist is moist, how to soften edges and much more. In particular she teaches how to paint a wash using a "bead." I can find only one other book in my watercolour collection which teaches about the "bead" and that book pays only scant attention to it. Yet, having tried this technique of laying a wash I have found it to be a most effective way of controlling your wash, which can also be used to fill in small shapes in your picture.

Above is my first painting - Project 1 from this book. It is by no means a perfect painting, I haven't always blended the greens with good technique, and there is some rather unsteady line drawing. The yellow background is too dark and the blue/violet mixes are not what I wished. I do not find the subject matter particularly interesting, but it is my first watercolour painting, and it only took about 2 hours, and I am impressed by how much I learned from completing this project. I will repeat the painting when I have some more time in the next few weeks - perhaps this time on hot pressed paper to see what it is like. "Painting Realistic Watercolors" is a great book, easily the best book I have which teaches the very basics of watercolour and then takes you through ten projects of increasing complexity and beauty. I look forward to working my way through this book.

(210 x 300, Bockingford cold pressed 300 gsm watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 28.9.07)

Julie's Art Site

I attended my art class for the first time in about 3 months on Thursday. (Having a day job and various family commitments had kept me away. I should also add that having purchased a copy of Halo 3 for the XBox360 did not keep me away from class this Thursday.) I was very happy to receive a warm welcome back to class after my "holiday." I was also rather surprised at how my perception of my unfinished painting "The Couple" had changed during my time away. I was very much happier with it on Thursday than I was 3 months ago, and now consider it not too far from being ready to be abandoned. I'll let you all see it in a few weeks I hope.

In the meantime I leave you with this link to Julie's (the art teacher) website. Click here. I've never personally known anyone crazy enough to hug a tiger before, but I guess that's art!

"Art is never finished, only abandoned." Leonardo da Vinci

That said, I am today posting two of my "abondoned" works of art. Abandoned? Perhaps not, these few are pictures which I stopped because I was overwhelmed with the technical complexity required to finish them. I will come back to them in time, after I have learned those skills - and I suspect also gained a certain degree more of patience.

Piazza San Marco is my first attempt at a pastel painting. What you see here as undergone many revisions. Starting with Winsor Newton pastels I found that I overworked the the picture so much that I lost the tooth, so I brushed a lot of the pastel off and moved to Faber Castell polychromos sticks and pitt pastel pencils. The much harder pastel allowed me a lot more control and I was much more pleased with my results (the face for example). Everything I read however seemed to point to the beauty of soft pastels, and after some months I purchased a collection of Schmincke soft pastels and went to work on the larger pigeon. It looked beautiful, and suddenly the pastel pencil work looked dull and lifeless.

I sprayed over the image with Schminke fixative in order that I could keep some tooth, and the colours changed. Especially the lighter colours immediately started to show the darker colours that I had layered beneath. I have read countless times about not overworking pastel, and here was the prrof. I was getting tired of repeating work over and over again, this and the complexity of the work led me to set this painting aside and start "learning" with a much simpler painting - Waitaria Bay, shown in an earlier post.

I like this image and very much wish to finish it, even if it means starting again from the beginning.

This second painting is my first attempt at an acrylic painting, and there are parts of this painting that I absolutely love - the luminosity of the yellow fence posts for example, and the expression on the boys face - he is taking every possible enjoyment in eating his icecream. My problem with this painting is two-fold. One, I painted the boys face, and then his arm, and found that the colours of the face and the arm didn't match. The solution - well I'm looking for advice on that! My thoughts are that I could try painting and layering the face and arm during the same sessions, and work up the whole painting at the same time rather than concentrating on tiny bits at a time. I tried this approach (to some degree) with "The Couple" and found it takes a lot of discipline not to fall back into my piecemeal style. Practice, practice and more practice.

My second problem lies (again) with painting the detail in the cobblestones, and the trees. If the only way to deal with this is to paint every leaf, and every cobblestone then perhaps I must. Preferably I would like to find a way of implying the detail, without ignoring it. The cobblestones almost worked, but not quite. I have no idea how to approach the branches and leaves.

Again, I very much like this photo, and would dearly love to see it hanging on my wall at home.