water colour – Page 5 – The Consulting Artist

Journey to Sunset

This piece is a continuation of Paints on a Plane. Once I arrived home I wanted to continue playing with the wet on wet technique. A friend got in touch to say he liked the earlier sketches so I said I’d develop something for him. I scaled up from postcard size to A4 and off I went.

I usually use Windsor Newton water colour pans when I paint but I decided to start out with some liquid water colours I bought a while ago. Big mistake. These liquid paints I have are cheap by comparison and they don’t blend.

I quickly switched back to what I was used to (Windsor Violet and Windsor Yellow) and continued to experiment. The main challenges I faced was being too heavy handed, and not sploshing enough water on to the paper to start with. I persevered with a few more attempts before going for it with lots of water on the paper and the addition of a third colour (Cerulean Blue). I tried to make my strokes both lighter and quicker this time, and I left more time for the paper to start to dry before applying the foreground.

Here is the finished painting and in the spirit of working out loud, you can see some of the practice runs in the slideshow beneath.

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Paints on a Plane

Here are three postcards painted using two of my favourite colours, Windsor Yellow and Windsor Violet. I made these flying at 35,000 feet en route from the USA to London. They are attempts at trying to paint wet on wet – using an aquash brush to supply the water and a normal paintbrush to provide the paint. I struggled to get the paper wet enough at first, and on the third attempt I got it a little better but then over did it with the streaks in the sky. I continued this experiment at ground level and will share the next stages over the weekend. Meantime, these three sketches are on their way to a friend in Scotland.

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Lonely House

I watched a video tutorial by Matt Forster recently. In it he talks about and demonstrates the technique of wet on wet watercolour.

I found myself in a hotel bedroom last night, having spent the afternoon at the funeral of a dear friend’s father. I’d had a few drinks at the somewhat extended wake and I had Matt’s video in my mind, but I didn’t have any water colour paint with which to practice! Instead – I put water onto a postcard and then sketched over it in pencil. I let the background dry and then added the hill and the house.

The sketch has a little more to it in real life, in places the pencil has built up in layers as I went over and over a few parts, alternating pencil and water. It’s a little something and nothing post wake drunken spurge, and I quite like it.