Oh my goodness, watercolour is difficult!

Last night I was roaming around on You Tube thinking about having some more arty fun.  I came across some watercolour demos which were fascinating.  I was amazed by the way the painters use the water to carry the paint and how quick and subtle and skillful some of them are.  Amazing stuff!  So I thought I’d have a go.  It was a bit of a leap of faith as I am, apart from one previous poor attempt, a water colour virgin.  However, one of the reasons I’m writing this blog is to stretch myself a bit and try things which are difficult.  For me painting with acrylics is like coming home, it’s like doing something I know well and love.  With water colour it’s very different.  I feel like I’m in the deep end in foreign territory where I am suddenly a painting mute.

So, first I got some things together.  Since I’ve only got three sheets of watercolour paper I wanted to practice a bit at first so I got out some thick charcoal paper in an off-white colour and some coloured pastel paper to practice and play around on.

I tried working on the charcoal paper first because most watercolour work I’ve seen has been on lighter paper.

It didn’t start out well…

I wanted to paint a hedgerow in early spring when there’s been a late snow and the sky and snow look blueish white and the hedgerow looks brown apart from this tree with pink blossom.  I saw it a few years back.  That was the idea anyway.    🙂

I don’t know what that blank blob is doing in the sky or why the colour is all yuck but this is how it started.  Really I should have stopped at this point but I blundered onwards…

After I did this I felt quite sick…

It’s fennel tea with my paint brush in it.  Maybe that’s a clue as to why my colour was all odd?  Note to self… keep your tea cup away from your water jar Jo – it’s too easy for you to get confused.   😀

Anyway, in the end it didn’t turn out at all how I could see it in my mind.  I’ll show it here for accuracy purposes but I’m far from proud of this one.

Ahem…moving on.

Next I wanted to use the fact that water colour is great at representing sky and sea.  I decided to paint a boat in a calm empty seashore at night. (It had to be at night becuase I was going to use dark(ish) blue paper.)

It started out OK…

…and then went pretty horrible…

So I started again, with a landscape picture this time…

By this stage I was at the point of giving up on watercolours and, because of that I think, I relaxed and stopped fretting about it.  It ended up a little better…

I’ll have another go tomorrow on real water colour paper and see what happens.    🙂

(All Images unless otherwise explicitly stated are © Jo Fox, 2015)