Thursday, February 23, 2017

The difficulty of painting water in watercolour - part deux

Did I mention I was stubborn? Forgetful and stubborn, that's not a good combination!

Anyways - between my new bible on watercolours, Watercolor Painting, A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium, by Tom Hoffmann, and some useful videos on YouTube, I've made progress!

So, after washing off the horrible heavy colour, I waited for the paper to dry thoroughly, then I rewetted the area I wanted to rework - the whole water area. I then dropped fairly thick pigment in various spots and let the water do the job. As you can still see the ghost image of what I washed off below this new glaze, you do get a fairly convincing shimmering water effect. I just need to rework the wooden pillars to make them more vibrant, and I'll be done then!

And this time I remembered to take before and after photos!

First attempt - too heavy with the colours. My ripples look like an oil slick without shine. The areas reserved with masking fluid don't work. The peach colour that's supposed to represent building reflections looks awful

This is what it looked like after I washed off most of the paint off the paper - I had to use a toothbrush to get rid of as much of the high-staining phthalo pigment (the ugly ripples) as I could.

After rewetting and applying fresh, juicy pigment.

Who said you can't fix watercolours when they go wrong??

No comments:

Post a Comment