How was your week? I hope it was a good one.
This week I’ve been learning how to improve my watercolor painting. It isn’t going very well. Do you ever feel like sometimes there is nothing that goes right in your artwork?
That’s how this whole experience is going.
When I draw, it’s easy to use more pressure or a softer pencil to get tone. With watercolor, using less water isn’t doing it. I understand that diluting the paint with water lets the paper show through, producing “lighter” shades on white paper. But using less water doesn’t get me a deeper tone. It just produces a more saturated hue. This is frustration #1.
Frustration #2 is this: adding additional layers sometimes produces tones, but woe to me every time I try this using the wrong hue, because it frequently results in an ugly color. What is the secret to achieving nice subtle shading?!
Sometimes I wonder if it’s something quite obvious that I’m missing or if I’m just plain stupid.
I decided to try a paid subscription to ArtistsNetwork TV to see if I could learn the proper techniques. While browsing all the watercolor lessons, I discovered a tutorial by Lian Quan Zhen that combines Chinese ink techniques with watercolor. it looked like something I might be able to learn.
So, using a picture I modified from pixabay, I watched through his video twice and then painted this colorful picture of elephants.
This made me feel so much better! It looks nice, but the real work was done only with layers of gray. Just like I’d do in a graphite drawing.
I decided to try it again on another painting. This one started nicely. The colors that I chose for the background washes were fine, but when I tried putting the first tones on my rabbit everything seemed to go to mud.
What could I do? I didn’t want to throw it out, so I started working on the rabbit in colored pencil.
What do you think? I kind of like it, but it has far more detail than the elephants. I’ll have to see what it looks like when it’s done.
Here’s another attempt from an ArtistNetwork TV tutorial:
It was fun, but I added detail with a dip pen. It just didn’t look right without it.
That’s all for today. Here’s wishing you another happy week full of fun!
originally posted at annettezimmerman.com
