Watercolors 3 and 4

Over the last week or so I've gotten a couple more watercolors done. Both are small 6" by 9" on 90 lb (thin) Artist's Loft paper. The first was a simple practice sketch, and the second I put a lot more effort into.

Watercolor #3 was a quick sketch of a pair of rune-covered standing stones suitable for our Dungeons and Dragons games. If we can ever play again... This was intended as an exercise in shading, and was a good learning experience. The whole thing took less than an hour, in several short sessions. I've been playing around with letting things dry in between different layers to see how the paint reacts. My skies are still very streaky with horizontal lines, which I think is because I am using too small a brush. For large areas like this I need to be using a larger "mop" brush. I'm not sure I have one but if not that's an easy enough fix.

Runestones for D&D

Watercolor #4 is loosely copied from an oil painting YouTube video by Yasser Fayad of an Egyptian village. I like his paintings a lot, and this was very evocative for me.

First I blocked in some of the basic colors, and then spent some time shading the buildings.

Sky, tree and houses

Then I put a bluish-green wash on the horizon to be the base for hazy trees in the background. In oils or acrylics, this would have been accomplished differently, but with watercolors I am learning to understand where the light areas need to be preserved, since you can't go back and paint light over dark. Very different planning from oils and acrylics...

Horizon wash

Then comes blocking in most of the remaining colors, although at this point I have no idea how I am going to get a stream effect with watercolors.

Blocking in remaining colors

Lastly comes fiddling around with shading, details, and doing something with the little stream. "Bleh" on the stream, but what's done is done.

Calling it finished

After a while, I had to put down the brushes and call it finished. There are some things that no amount of fiddling with are going to make better than they are, and it is more important to move on to another painting than to invest more time in this one.

Overall, I'm very pleased. As always, good bits and not so good bits, but I need to keep telling myself this is only the fourth watercolor of any kind I have ever done. Every one is a learning experience, and having done some actual painting myself, it makes watching YouTube tutorials much more meaningful in terms of understanding what they are trying to teach.

On to the next one...