Exercise: Tonally graded washes

In this exercise, I am trying to reduce the colour in a smooth progression as I place the wash on the paper, the wash should appear as one patch of watercolour trying to avoid any signs of  switching between each mixture of  watercolour.

In my first attempt I think there is too much of a contrast between the initial,middle and end areas of water colour. In such a case I may resort to running the paper under the tap to correct the areas I am not happy with.

Exercise: Plain washes

In this exercise I am practising adding a even wash across a sheet of paper. I think I was successful, however this may been due to the fact that I used a faint wash. Once wash was dried I painted a red triangle in a stronger (more paint) watercolour mix, this was is not as even but has left little evidence of the underlying green wash.

As the underlying wash was  completely dry there is no bleeding / blending around the outer edge of the triangle, the form is crisp as if I had painted it on to a plain (no underlying wash) sheet of paper.

Depending on your colour choices the dried wash does not appear to impact the application of paint on top of this, painting detail on a wash should not be a concern.

Exercise: Fish and leaves

In this exercise we had to paint simple shapes with a minimum amount of detail and brush strokes as possible being  mindful of the shapes that seemed to work better than others.

I found it harder to achieve satisfactory result with each fish that I painted than I did with the leaves, perhaps you can get away with more random marks when painting a leaf.

Tried to keep the brush will loaded with paint, felt this stops me fiddling, if I pause for to long adding the bottom fin to the fish I may end up depositing more paint than I want.

In the second part of the exercise I decided to stick with the fish shapes, better able to judge in my view whether shape is successful or not, certainly happier with the fish shapes produce second time around... getting better with practice and some therapeutic about painting the same shape again and again.

When attempting to wash off the fish shapes I was surprised how difficult it was to remove the paint, the shapes remained visible although slightly faded despite putting the painting under a running tap and at the same time rubbing into the shapes with a paint brush.

The end result, I am left with a faded shapes which have kept their original form. Painting fresh fish shapes on to the same painting give a sense of depth, with faded fish in the background, this work better on the side of the painting that includes the wash, possibly because the wash helps with the feeling that the fish are swimming in water.

Exercise: Random marks

1st Indigo flick of paint, in all the marks they are darkest around the edge, all most like the and outline has been added.

Second application of paint flicks/drips applied using Raw Sienna, a lot lighter than the Indigo so you don't get the same variations of tone coming through in the marks that you do with the darker colour.

Where the drips hit the dried indigo paint the rather than rest on top the paint beings to merge (indigo marks being reactivated), creating a greenish blue.

Painted over half the sheet with a thin wash of Alizarin Crimson, the Indigo marks have smudged in some places, moving in the direction of the brush. There is also a lot of bleeding around the Indigo marks with the Raw Sienna marks being more permanent, less affected by the Crimson wash.

Exercise: Fading tones

In this exercise I started by painting a line with a very strong mix of blue watercolour paint, the with each  new line I add a brush load of clean brush load of water the the paint mix and continued in this manner until I reached the end of the sheet of paper.

In most of the lines the is evidence of more of the mixture being deposited as I start to paint the line, this was not intentional and put it down to me having over loaded the brush and requiring a more practice with this medium (early days).

The paper I used is not the smoothest and as such there are a few, very small patches of paper where the paint has not been applied. These marks, as you may expect, are more apparent where the paint is darker.

Exercise: Loading the brush

In this exercise I painted three small even patches with different amounts of watercolour on a size six brush.

In first patch the brush was fully loaded until it was dripping, when the brush touched the paper the watercolour began to pool around the brush head. On the dried patch the pooling is still evident, the patch is not all a consistent tone.

In the second patch just the dip of the brush was dipped in the watercolour, it was easy to paint the patch keeping the tone even.

In the third patch I was surprised to find that despite being more watercolour on the brush I still felt I had the same amount of control as with the second patch