Watercolour with Wendy

After a few weeks of drawing in Wendy’s class we started to paint with watercolour. My plan was to buy the least expensive Cotman watercolour set to be sure I liked the medium. Brushes, however needed to be good quality and Wendy recommended ‘Rosemary & Co’;  shipping is £1 or free on orders over £30. Better watercolour paper has to be bought in individual sheets; or lesser quality can be purchased in pads. Wendy had paper for us to buy, sometimes I used the good paper and sometimes A4 paper from a pad. The pads are available in hot pressed, cold pressed and rough. Someday I’ll figure out the difference, besides the hot pressed being smoother.

To start with we did a colour wheel, mixing colours with red, blue & yellow.

My first watercolour came out better than expected, it was a tonal study so we only used one colour. 

The second was o.k. but not as impressive as with the first. For this we used two colours.

For the third we used all colours and it was the least impressive. So the moral is, for me at least, the less colours the better.

O.k. maybe I just had a bad day because the fourth was an ink and wash and it was kinda good. Other classmates had more vibrant colours; mine was washed out looking. I don’t know if it’s the paint, maybe I need artist quality. 

The sheep and bird I did at home… really liking the ink and wash technique.