watercolour exercises – a lighthouse and a farm field

In my search for videos on painting in watercolour, I found eHow.com. If you’re not careful you can lose yourself in all the tips and advices on this site.

Anyway, I followed the instructions in this series of videos for this very rough watercolour piece.

In the video they make a wash of colour seem like such an easy thing, but as you could see my sky and sea are all blotchy and stripy. It was also quite strange to draw the sketch with watercolour and a brush, but as long as the lines are faint, you can paint over it without much problem.

The following is a continuation of the exercise above.

This was even rougher than the sketch above, and again you can see I’ve completely botched up the sky. But I liked how the field look 3D (albeit rough and primary-school-ish).

A thing I learnt from these videos is that when trying a new technique, when practicing, it is best not to be too caught up in making the rest of the picture pretty. I need to paint a picture to put the technique into perspective (ie. I need to paint a rough field to practice the 3D effect, not just painting curved lines on a blank piece of paper), but I shouldn’t be too caught up with the rest of the picture or I would never get any practicing done.