Yesterday was a really busy day, and I did not find the time to paint. Today I was going to visit a wool party in Utrecht, but unfortunately I woke up with a really bad headache that only slowly ebbed away. So I decided not to go and have a quiet day at home instead. At first I did not do anything, but during the afternoon I started feeling better, and I picked up my painting stuff and started working.
I painted a landscape and tried to keep things more transparent. I was a bit frustrated, because I did not manage to paint the air the way I wanted to. I wanted to make smooth clouds, but they look dry and hard instead. I don’t know how to improve this. I see I have too many hard edges, but I don’t know how to fix that. I can’t really go back to lighter areas, and I don’t want to make the whole painting darker because the paper is already suffering from too much fiddling – hence the frustration. On the other hand, the details are better and I like the water mostly. I have a new waterbrush with a fine tip and it makes a huge difference.
Because of the dryness, it looks more like a sketch than a finished painting. The depth is nice, as are parts of the water. But the sky is awful. I didn’t know if working on it more would improve anything, so I put the painting aside and started improvising on a postcard instead. I used happy colours.
I did overwork the flowers a bit, at one point they looked almost the way I wanted them, but fiddling with them more made them worse again. I also should not have put in the leaves. But it was fun to paint this.
Perhaps I should look for a watercolour painting course or workshop of some kind. I’m getting a bit fed up with my lack of skill, and perhaps a teacher can give me some tips so that I can paint what I want to paint instead of something meh.
Awesome paintings! I understand what you mean about getting frustrated. The only thing I know about watercolor is that if you want smooth edges you should focus on working wet in wet. I used to work with watercolors a lot when I was in uni, but I’ve never had actual courses either so I’m not sure if you should be listening to me haha
Etsy and youtube have some awesome courses you can try! Sometimes it’s best to just move on and appreciate the progress over the course of several paintings <3
Thanks for your comment! I didn’t know you also did watercolour, cool! (I’d love to see your work
do you still paint?)
Yes, I agree that wet in wet is the way to go.
I think the problem is that I tried to work from light to dark and didn’t work fast enough, so parts were already dry when I added a new value – no blending. I’ll just have to speed up my process by envisioning the steps beforehand, preparing the paint mixes and maybe even using a spray bottle to keep the painting wet…
Too late for that now in this painting, but I will try to improve in the next ones… YouTube is a great resource, I agree! I will look on Etsy too.
Thanks for your kind words <3