Project 1 Where to look and how to select
I made two attempts at painting a view from inside as I wasn’t too happy with the first one.
ONE FROM INDOORS
When I began painting the outside version of the 2nd attempt I felt that I didn’t really know what I was doing with the foliage yet again. From the position I was sitting in on a low stool, it was also too awkward to put the board down at regular intervals and stand away from it. On one occasion when I dropped a brush I went to put the board down to try and grab it and accidentally knocked my drink over, luckily (or not) on my painting, perhaps that would have improved it.
1 and 2 Challenges: Whether working outside or inside there didn’t at first appear to be any distinct variations of colour in the scene before me, they were certainly there but I had to look really hard to make out the different colours and tones and I kept asking myself how do I break up all that green? particularly during my 1st attempt – from inside house.
TWO FROM INDOORS
3 Working inside, part of the window frame was around the middle of my scene and I had to keep looking around it – I didn’t want to include it as I think it would have broken up the picture in the wrong place and made it look disjointed. In my 2nd attempt, the window frame, though it looks ambiguous as the foliage overlaps it half way up it helps to add depth and dimension, especially off at an angle.
4 The elements I would say I was most involved with were: in a good way, the 2nd version from inside, the dark silhouetted background trees at the far right hand side went right quite easily, but involved? I’m not sure. In a not too good way, I definitely became involved in a struggle with foliage – as is usual for me, especially the round green bush and the yellow one next to it, to a lesser degree. I added several layers, which they appeared to need to build adequate depth, but this didn’t seem to help, so it felt like a lot of work for nothing.
5 I succeeded most I think, with the background trees (in the outside version of 2nd attempt) for which I used wet on wet paint, as they seemed to go right straight away, feeling quick and spontaneous. As to how I managed this so easily was down to luck, as other areas didn’t go so well. For the driveway I used rock sea salt on wet paint for texture but the texture looked too large and out of proportion so I painted over with a quick glaze, sweeping the brush in the direction of the tyre tracks in the gravel, this softened and gave movement to it. The colours used for this were raw umber the emerald green (I think) was from the pan set of mysterious colours. These two colours helped to tone down the rather bright pinky tinge it had taken on beforehand.
THREE FROM OUTDOORS
6 Areas I think I need to improve on come down to basically practice, practice, practice, I think, such as:
a Control of wet on dry and wet on wet techniques.
b To start with the background and don’t paint any of the sky in cases where I want to leave white areas in front of it, such as with the 2nd outside version.
c I overworked the purple (lower right) making the tone too dark all over so I lifted some colour with the edge of a damp sponge but ended up with strange looking blobs, not sure what to do here apart from more practice.
d Scratching out and sgraffito – I later tried using my fingernails for sgraffito – it seems to work well, for removing paint back to the white paper, in the main but I have to watch for getting carried away…
7 I have learned from this exercise that the sketchbook paper, (200gsm unbranded) which was relatively cheap and quite smooth, held up surprisingly well considering the soaking it got.
As with most paintings, it occurred to me later that I could have used other techniques which may have been more effective, ie. scraping the wet paint to form lighter lines for the trees (I didn’t get the hang of this until much later on) and experimental brush marks for the foliage and finer branches.
ainewatercolouroca 