I have a love/hate relationship with watercolor. I am a control freak by nature, so it is not easy for me to hold a loaded paintbrush over a sheet of blank, high-quality watercolor paper without getting nervous. At its best, I am overjoyed when the paint dries to reveal something beautiful, but my heart breaks when I fail. That’s why I have been avoiding watercolors and sticking to my “safe” colored pencils.
But over the last several months, I have been touching up watercolor mistakes on old paintings and in the process I realized that mistakes are okay. Sometimes the mistakes look better than what you intend and if not, they can be fixed or improved upon.
This week I painted a small watercolor and WILLED myself to stay relaxed and loose for 98% of the time. The hard part was when I realized that I liked the painting so far and was tempted to stop before I screwed it up. But I continued to add more to the watercolor because I was curious to see what would happen and I was having fun! And isn’t that the point?? :)
Here is the watercolor in progress with some of the trees painted in. The trees remind me of the spots on cows:
Then I added more as you can see below. I was tempted to leave the background with just the yellow, but adding the green shrubs behind the trees really helped define the trees. On the left is the painting in progress and the right is the finished painting. You can see some differences where I “erased” some parts (using a paintbrush loaded with water) to make it look more streamlined: the bottom edge of the grass and the hard watercolor edges along the tree.
I painted this with cadmium yellow, windsor blue (red shade), french ultramarine, burnt sienna and some other random paint that was still sticking to the watercolor palette. The paper is Arches 140lb coldpressed.
For the trees, I used a nice filbert and small round brushes. I used a decrepit brush (my paint mixing brush) to paint the yellow background and green shrubs by jabbing the brush and doing other random motions on the paper. Then I used the decrepit brush to paint the grass in the foreground using sweeping upward motions to make it look grass-like.
I added a little bit of colored pencils for the shading on the tree and to add some extra yellow leaves to the foliage. Then I signed it with a dip pen loaded with green-blue paint.
I just added the original watercolor to my Etsy shop! Check it out here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/52625686/early-fall-trees-original-watercolor?ref=shop_home_active_1
Thank you for visiting my blog :)
Jasmine Ray 