Watercolour Buildings

Final week of my watercolour course, and I enjoyed this one much more. To me this looks a bit Italian.

Bits could be done better, so I may have another try at home. I wish I had done the church on the hill a bit smaller, so it would look further away, and the ghostly white tree did not work well. 

Watercolour Flowers

Some more weeks at my watercolour art class, and although I am not overly happy with my efforts, I am trying to think to them as learning exercises. 

 

On this first painting we used a gum masking fluid on the areas of white flowers. All seemed to be going well, and I was happy with the watery background. But then when I got to the stage of peeling off the masking gum it just wouldn't come off very well. Blobs were left, and in some places my efforts meant the paper was flaking. No one else in the class seemed to have this problem, and I was getting left behind as they all went on to the flower details. So in the end I gave up trying to remove all the gum, but was then rushing to catch up with the other stages. Was not happy with the end result, but the teacher said that I would perhaps like it a bit better when I got home, and she was right.

 

The next week we painted echinacea flowers, and although a bit of a mess I did enjoy the process much more.

 One more lesson to go, which is going to be buildings.

 

Watercolour Class

I've started going to a new painting class, which followed on from the ink drawing. This is watercolours for beginners, which is actually what I thought I had signed up for before. I'm not overly happy with my two paintings so far, but I am trying to view the class as a way of learning techniques, which is obviously going to take a while.

I was not sure whether to post them, but then thought that this is just a personal blog, so not everything has to be great. 

The first week we did seascapes, and my picture was really quite insipid compared to the rest of the class. I was thinking Scottish isles, where I think everyone else was going tropical. I was not too uphappy with the sky or foreground, but realised that part of my problems were because I had bought the wrong sort of paper. I think that is why my distant islands ran into the sea. We were shown how to use masking fluid to make the waves. But when I look now, I actually prefere this one to the next painting.

What can I say? The hills are too dark, the tree a complete mess, the hillock too blue, and what is all the white space meant to be? I didn't want to use red for the blossom tree, and was toying with the radical idea of green leaves. But I was not brave enough to do my own thing. Maybe the rocks and foreground are not too bad. 

In the class we are all essentially doing very similar paintings, and although we looked at some beach scenes and trees, it does seem a little bit "Bob Ross". Please don't get me wrong, because I love Bob Ross, but I think I want to try and make pictures that are realistic, and not purely from my imagination. But I guess these are really exercises in handling the paint and learnings techniques, and we will then be able to do what we want.

Another problem may be that I don't really want to paint landscapes. There seem a lot of amateur landscape and seascapes around, and I think I might really like to have some buildings in a scene, or even do some still life, or animals.

But next week we are moving on to flowers, and I think after that maybe buildings, so watch this space ....