A starting point: yesterday's pencil sketch repeated in watercolour.
Double page spread in 4.5" by 6" Daler Rowney hardback sketchbook with very cockly 150gm/sqm paper. Light pencil sketch to place main shapes, then right in with watercolour. Right foreground should have been an evergreen shrub or flower bed, but I ran out of time and didn't touch it up in any way when I got home.
Palette: ultramarine, sap green, burnt umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre. Cerulean and touch of cobalt in sky only.
What I like about this painting:
1. The colours are fresh and clear, pretty much straight off the pan with minimum mixing on the palette. I use these hues a lot and am comfortable working with them.
2. The modelling of the bench is a good start, although the perspective is a bit off.
3. Trees: I deliberately painted the foliage in clumps and tried to model each clump for volume. I like the spaces in the foliage because they suggest space through and behind the tree.
4. I like the splashes of paint for leaves because they suggest movement and liveliness, but more are needed in a greater variety of tones and colours.
5. I tried to paint a receding succession of planes from foreground to background to convey depth. Forgot to add the paler hill behind the far shore!
What I need to work on:
1. Deeper shadow colours and more clearly defined shadow shapes to make the white paper really zing.
2. How to interpret the different foliage of various plants and clumps without getting fussy or same-y?
3. Skies! There were lovely little fair-weather clouds that I left out.
4. Drawing is a bit amorphous. I need to get the underlying shapes the right size, shape, and proportion so that I know where to put the paint to show volume, where the boundaries are between light and dark and the shapes of light and dark areas.
Next step: Check out some other watercolourists to see their approaches to these elements. Also try to figure out how to format this blog...
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