2.1.3

Watercolour Practice

PART 2 Painting from observation

Project 1 Drawing and watercolour

Exercise 3 Adding line to watercolour

I decided to take the option of continuing with the still life arrangement from exercise 2 because I can already see the benefit of repeatedly using the same motif in different styles and repeated work makes you more familiar with your subject.

I already had the drawing and the tracing from exercise 2 (Figs 1 and 2) so I pressed on. Not that quickly though because I was thinking about the paint I was using. So far I have been using Winsor and Newton’s artist quality watercolours in tubes. The problem with this is that it is hard to repeat a given strength of wash so I used two palettes, one with deep wells in which I premixed thick strong thick washes of my colours and the other for mixing on. Working this way helped, I think, in producing clearer washes, it did however have the downside that the cat has left multi-coloured paw prints all over the floor.

Another change I made was to change my paper to hot pressed as I knew for my experiences in exercise 1 how difficult it was to get a proper line on the Not surface. This had the added disadvantage that it was more difficult to produce the washes but on the whole I don’t think they came out too bad.

I did the watercolour and ink version first; the ink lines have a flattening effect that gives it a very modern decorative feel.

I was looking forward to doing the Ink Charcoal one as charcoal is one of my favourite media and I had never used it before with a coloured under painting. I found it much easier to bring out the form in the subject using the charcoal though I imagine this is due to my lack of skill in using watercolours to produce form.

It may please you to know that Freya the cat and I are now happily reconciled, even though if you look closely you can see her paw print on the table edge in figure 2, watercolour is definitely increasing my patience levels.

 Figure 1 (2.1.3.1) Still life watercolour and ink on A3 HP paper

Figure 2 (2.1.3.2) Still life watercolour and charcoal on A3 HP paper