Wednesday 29 May 2013

WIP Wednesday - Watercolour


 


This is the third watercolour sheet - one finished painting and the lines for the next one, which I'll hopefully be able to start painting at the end of this week. 

Tuesday 7 May 2013

New watercolour goodies!

I've been doing a bit more work on my current painting between typing up university work and the paper has absolutely died, so after a few Twitter conversations with Pullingers, I ended up going out and buying this:


The book is no longer sold on Amazon but they had one in the store, so I jumped on it :D The black portfolio is to keep finished art things in, because otherwise I tend to not be able to find them again, and the mini canvasses are for acrylic fun that I will try later.

The Winsor & Newton case is the Sketchers' Case that is now discontinued - I ended up with one of their last two for just £18! It came with a Cotman pocket sketchers' paint box (the one I already use), an A6 hardback sketch book, a paintbrush, a pencil, an eraser and a water bottle. I harvested the paint pans from the set and put them in my surplus paints box, then used the empty box for my 12 homeless artists' watercolours. When I go out I take the paint box that I've already used with me - I tried one watercolour sketch on the day that I got it and it looks so awful I don't even know if I'll blog it. I'm gonna need to read that book quite carefully I think!

The rest is for stretching paper so that it doesn't end up as dead as my current sheet is. I've never stretched paper before so that's going to be quite messy. I got an A3 MDF board and an A2 MDF board, plus tape and a knife. Soak paper, lay on board, tape down, leave to dry, paint, cut off board? As far as I know. I have books that have paper stretching tutorials in them so I'll give those a read before I destroy a piece of paper. It's really gonna annoy me not to have paper the exact size anymore due to what I'll lose by cutting it off the board, though.

I also did a bit of Googling and found this!


It's a Cotman Field Brush set. It arrived after my disastrous sketch, so I'm yet to use it, but it's a little case around A6 size with a pencil, a number 10 field brush, an eraser and a sponge, plus three reversible brushes: size 5, size 3 and size 00. Once the lids of the reversible brushes have been removed they can be put on the end of the brush to create a longer handle and therefore turn them into full-sized brushes. They DO fit in the pocket sketchers' boxes - it's a very close fit but they do go in there and the box opens and closes just fine. So this combined with the Sketchers' Case means that the only thing that sucks about outdoor watercolour sketching is me. Still, practice makes perfect and all that...