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.

Colour Book Review

Because of illness I couldn’t drive to Alton anymore and wasn’t able to finish my last paint project with Jane @ Ashley-Brian Art.

While trying to finish the painting at home it became obvious that I needed to learn more about colour and mixing paint; hence the next book in my growing library.

‘Colour: a workshop for artists and designers’ by David Hornung is a fantastic book that teaches you about using colour. The book suggests you buy Gouache paint to do the assignments. There are eleven colours in total: cool, warm & earth tone/reds, blues & yellows = (9) + white and dark brown. Jackson Art Supplies  in the UK had the best price and variety of the Turner paints. It probably would have been fine to use acrylic paint, however the book tells you the exact colour names for each brand (5 brands listed). In my limited experience every paint supplier uses different colour names....it's enough to drive you crazy.

Chapter two - First Principles; is about the structure of colour hue, value and saturation. I made four colour wheels and a greyscale with the warm and cool colours.

Chapter four - Beginning Colour Studies; assignments were about using different chroma greys, muted colours, prismatic colours and combined saturation in a small painting. Don't worry the book explains it all and provides a hue/saturation colour wheel.

After completing the assignments I got lazy and just read the rest of the book. There are plenty of exercises so a more disciplined person would really enjoy it. ‘Colour: a workshop for artists and designers’ is an excellent colour theory reference guide and while writing this blog I am tempted to read it again and do ALL the assignments.