Painting produced using online video tutorial at paintwild.com
I’ve commented many times before that “I struggle with watercolour”.
I love the idea of the medium …. its softness, its transparency, but I find it a real struggle to control. If it’s not on the Hogwart’s Dark-Arts curriculum it should be! Too much, or too little water and you will not get the effect you want … and nobody can tell you how much water that is because it will be different for differing brands and weights of paper. Even different colour paints from the same brand can require different amounts of water because of differing pigment strengths … and don’t even mention the effect of the weather (especially in the Queensland summer humidity). It reminds me of my dear old late Mum’s recipe for Bread Pudding … there were no grams or ounces, just “a bit” of this and “a good shake” of that.
I’ve achieved some ok watercolour pieces in the past but sometimes they have been lucky outcomes, and I’ve never reached the stage where I truly feel in control with watercolour. It would be easy to give up on it and just focus on acrylics, which are definitely my comfort zone … it’s not as though I don’t enjoy painting with acrylics. However, I can be a persistent bugger (hey – who said stubborn!!) but I did feel like I was probably as far as I was going to get with the self taught approach. So I’ve just subscribed to an online year long tutorial group and, as I seem to so often paint animals, I went with one that specialises in wildlife (www.PaintWild.com)
This tiger was from the first tutorial. The tutor (an Australian called Emma Witte) does the painting real-time in the video, and provides the coloured reference photo, a black and white version (easier to see contrast values) and even provides an outline sketch that can be traced for anyone that doubts their drawing ability. I submitted my first draft which I was pretty happy with and received feedback from the tutor and from the more experienced painters in the group. In the past, when I’ve tried to fix my watercolour work after it has dried too much I’ve often created bigger issues (hard edges, blooms or back-runs, blotchy colours, etc.) but Emma introduced me to new techniques (like dry-brush scumbling) that enabled me to boost the colour and improve the tonal values without stuffing it up. Well that’s not entirely true … I did stuff up (an ear) but I was able to use some of the techniques to recover the situation.
The end result ? … well you can see for yourself in the picture. It’s not perfect, but from a technical perspective it’s probably the best watercolour I’ve ever done. I certainly feel like I learnt more through the first tutorial than I have from hours of looking at free YouTube stuff and I even felt in control of the paint … for most of the time.
Just goes to prove, we are need a little help from time to time.