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