water colour – Page 13 – The Consulting Artist

Learning to Paint – Dining Alone

I’ve just returned from a couple of days working in Newcastle with some great customers. I stayed overnight on Tuesday which led to me dining alone that evening. Although I went to a very good Italian restaurant (Sabatini’s) and enjoyed good food and good service, I don’t enjoy dining alone. I took water colours and a small pad with me and started to paint.

So what is this picture all about? I guess the tree is me. Alone and stripped bare (this is my mood we’re talking about here – not my state of dress!). Dancing around the tree are vague outlines of creatures, a cross between something woodland and something quite sinister. I don’t think they represent my fellow diners, at least I hope they don’t!

After sketching this I was drawn into a Twitter conversation and my mood improved quickly I’m happy to say. And this is the first time I’ve really felt like my mood has so heavily influenced what I’ve painted.

The main colours in this picture are purples and browns with some bluey grey. For all you colour geeks I used Paynes Grey, Raw Umber and French Ultramarine for the tree, and Windsor Violet for the background (which was mainly applied to wet paper). The colours were drawn from the decor in the restaurant, though I should say they create a much more welcoming atmosphere there than they do in my picture!

Learning to Paint – Bad Day at the Office

A thoroughly underwhelming day with the paintbrush today. I had plans to spend most of the day painting and started out trying to paint a flower which had bloomed early alongside some of its neighbours, which have yet to follow suit. I put some background in and was going to put a blue wash over the picture before deciding it was so bad, adding more would be a waste of time. The flower in the middle is particularly unappealing.

I then had a little play with trying some leaf shapes around the edges then had one more go at the flower on its own on a separate piece of paper. Nothing seemed to go right today so I knocked painting on the head and cut the grass instead!

Learning to Paint – The Apple Has Landed

I painted an apple. It floated in the middle of nowhere. The following day I went back and added some shadow and a surface for the apple to sit on. The apple has landed. This is the first time I’ve gone back to a sketch to improve and add to it. Having let stage one dry it made working on stage two much easier as the colours weren’t running into each other so much.