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.
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...
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!
Wednesday, 10 April 2013
Watercolour Disasters - Volume 2
Nearly a year after the last four, here's the next four! This involved introducing my scanner to the new laptop for the first time, so this blog post has been fairly traumatic.
I started the horse in May 2012 and then went back to stay with family for summer and didn't take the reference with me, so I had to leave it alone. Prior to continuing with it, it looked like this:
The dappling was purely accidental. After I'd left it for so long, I didn't really want to go back to it, in case this version ended up looking better, and I wasn't 100% sure about this no-black rule, because mixing dark colours was a bitch to do. I really wish I'd just left it now. The "finished" version resembles a peat bog on legs. Oh well. The "black" is burnt umber and ultramarine, as usual. I suppose I could do a burnt umber wash over the pale grey parts, but I honestly never want to touch this again.
The beach I painted while back home in summer 2012 - it was the only bit of art I did the entire time I was there, which is never good - and it was just supposed to be a stupidly simple picture that took less than ten minutes to do. It looks like one, so I guess that wasn't a total failure.
The flowers were both done recently using my own photo references. The purple one just would not do what I wanted it to do. I also learned, perhaps a little late, that you can't really paint veins on petals when you're only using one brush. A bigger selection of brushes would probably have served this one better. Still, it's a marked improvement on the flower painting from the first sheet I think. I left it alone before I killed it, but I'm not sure I'd say it was finished. Still, I'm not going to go near it ever again.
The tulips I just did because I quite like flowers - I know I said I was going to do other things for this sheet so I suppose doing two flower paintings was cheating. I also cheated on colours for this one - I used a colour that isn't in the palette of 12. I took it from the full set of 45 and then put it back when I was done with it. Mixing pink just isn't something I can do though, so without it they would have been red. I used Rose Madder Hue. In the photo, the flower on the right is in focus while the one on the left is completely blurred and the one in the middle is, well, in the middle. This didn't come across too well (or at all) in the painting. I actually like the middle flower the best, possibly the best out of all eight watercolour disasters so far.
The original plan was to do the two sheets of four and then move on to sheets of two, to give myself more space and practice with larger paintings. I'm not sure whether to stick with this plan or not though, because I think I still need more practice with the A6 sizes. I suppose only two paintings per sheet might inspire me to actually put more time into them - a large problem has been rushing - but I'm still undecided. I won't say what I'll be painting because I didn't stick to it last time.
Here's the obligatory beauty shot of the paints, after the second sheet. It's a fairly shitty photo, but there's a huge crater in the ultramarine and smaller craters in some of the others - my paint is looking used at last. I can't dig the paint blocks out of the pans anymore.
A note though, the brush is starting to look very used. The bristles are starting to lose their shape and I have a feeling that the paint box will outlive the brush I have for it, which is a slight problem because W&N don't seem to sell the tiny brushes for these boxes separately. I could probably take a brush from a different box when this one dies - I think I have a box with a brush that's the same - but then that box won't have a brush either, so I don't know. I have a mini artist quality brush, but I think it's too thick to fit in these boxes. Hmm. Points for the paints, minus points for the shitty brush.
Here's to the next sheet of watercolours kicking my ass :)
I started the horse in May 2012 and then went back to stay with family for summer and didn't take the reference with me, so I had to leave it alone. Prior to continuing with it, it looked like this:
The dappling was purely accidental. After I'd left it for so long, I didn't really want to go back to it, in case this version ended up looking better, and I wasn't 100% sure about this no-black rule, because mixing dark colours was a bitch to do. I really wish I'd just left it now. The "finished" version resembles a peat bog on legs. Oh well. The "black" is burnt umber and ultramarine, as usual. I suppose I could do a burnt umber wash over the pale grey parts, but I honestly never want to touch this again.
The beach I painted while back home in summer 2012 - it was the only bit of art I did the entire time I was there, which is never good - and it was just supposed to be a stupidly simple picture that took less than ten minutes to do. It looks like one, so I guess that wasn't a total failure.
The flowers were both done recently using my own photo references. The purple one just would not do what I wanted it to do. I also learned, perhaps a little late, that you can't really paint veins on petals when you're only using one brush. A bigger selection of brushes would probably have served this one better. Still, it's a marked improvement on the flower painting from the first sheet I think. I left it alone before I killed it, but I'm not sure I'd say it was finished. Still, I'm not going to go near it ever again.
The tulips I just did because I quite like flowers - I know I said I was going to do other things for this sheet so I suppose doing two flower paintings was cheating. I also cheated on colours for this one - I used a colour that isn't in the palette of 12. I took it from the full set of 45 and then put it back when I was done with it. Mixing pink just isn't something I can do though, so without it they would have been red. I used Rose Madder Hue. In the photo, the flower on the right is in focus while the one on the left is completely blurred and the one in the middle is, well, in the middle. This didn't come across too well (or at all) in the painting. I actually like the middle flower the best, possibly the best out of all eight watercolour disasters so far.
The original plan was to do the two sheets of four and then move on to sheets of two, to give myself more space and practice with larger paintings. I'm not sure whether to stick with this plan or not though, because I think I still need more practice with the A6 sizes. I suppose only two paintings per sheet might inspire me to actually put more time into them - a large problem has been rushing - but I'm still undecided. I won't say what I'll be painting because I didn't stick to it last time.
Here's the obligatory beauty shot of the paints, after the second sheet. It's a fairly shitty photo, but there's a huge crater in the ultramarine and smaller craters in some of the others - my paint is looking used at last. I can't dig the paint blocks out of the pans anymore.
A note though, the brush is starting to look very used. The bristles are starting to lose their shape and I have a feeling that the paint box will outlive the brush I have for it, which is a slight problem because W&N don't seem to sell the tiny brushes for these boxes separately. I could probably take a brush from a different box when this one dies - I think I have a box with a brush that's the same - but then that box won't have a brush either, so I don't know. I have a mini artist quality brush, but I think it's too thick to fit in these boxes. Hmm. Points for the paints, minus points for the shitty brush.
Here's to the next sheet of watercolours kicking my ass :)
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