1. Sometimes watercolor takes a long time to dry and sometimes it dries really quickly. That sounds like the most educated sentence ever. But despite my 2nd grade sentence structure, it's taken a little bit to get used to different applications and how quickly they dry.
2. I've also been experimenting in which order I lay down pigment. In some landscapes, I had the intention of doing a wash over, say, trees but in other exercises I did a wash first and then did detail over. I prefer the latter approach so far.
3. I have a fear of totally and completely screwing up by adding too much pigment/too much water/my hand uncontrollably spasming and ruining the entire work.
4. But that being said, it's nice to be able to quickly fix any wrongdoings, which I learned when I added too much water at one point and was able to lift it using a dry paper towel.
5. So far, this entire process has been trial and error, learning how to use proper pigment, discovering texture techniques, and really just figuring out what I'm doing with this whole thing.
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10 Watercolor Landscapes
So below are the notes that I took during Illustration regarding the four stages of watercolor. I promised I'd put these notes up on my blog, Rusty, but apparently the janky library scanners couldn't handle this sketchbook so maybe I'll try again with the lab scanners. We'll see.
I really enjoyed experimenting with the different techniques we learned today. As noted in my mid-assignment reflection notes (where I decided I needed a break from nonstop watercolor and just jotted down the thoughts I was having about the assignment), it was really just a trial and error process.
In regards to time: I took the full twenty five minutes for each of these (except maybe the last two, those were about 15 minutes each) and had a hard time being patient waiting for the watercolor to dry. But I did take my sweet time on each of these which really just means that I was using this assignment as an excuse to distract me from the ten page research paper I was writing this afternoon as well. But anyway, I used my budget wisely for these ones.
I posted these in order of which they were completed:
Below is a landscape of my family's farm and from the Missouri Botanical Gardens. I struggled with the top landscape in regards to adding tone and figuring out how to distinguish between different layers (is that even the right word for that? I don't know) of trees in the background vs foreground. Also, there was a bale of hay in the foreground that I painted and then decided it looked horrendous so i just got some water and smoothed that one right out. Which is also why the "grassy" area is a liiiiittle bit more yellow in the bottom left hand corner. But who would know? Not I.
And on the bottom one below I also neglected to lay down tone in the beginning and rather painted the trees and reflection first which let's just say was not the best idea. I did a wash of a brown murky substance over the water area and this illustration would have been much better suited if the trees/reflection were painted over tone.
I'm not really digging the color distortion that these lovely scanners provide. But in regards to the above comment, for this next one I put the tone down first after learning from my mistakes and I think it works much better.
And the bottom one ... What would a watercolor be without some kind of sunset/sunrise picture, right?
The next one might be my favorite out of the ten. I liked the contrast of the detail and the water.
And below that is just some trees, which were kind of fun to paint because of the shadows and figuring out the best way to tackle that challenge.
I think as this assignment progressed, I got a little bit more loose with my style, and experimented with different methods and brushes in order to achieve texture and detail. Which resulted in "I'm not really sure what is happening in the lower left hand side of this one but we're just going to go with it"
Also, I noticed that my shadow technique that I had used in the trees above does not quite apply as well with the beach scene below. Noted.
Going out with a bang, with the most boring beach scene ever.
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