Of water and colours!

Long time since I blogged. I've been working on a few techniques lately. Especially watercolour. I recently went outdoor painting with an artist in Pune. It was a lot of fun and I learnt quite a few things. Outdoor on the spot sketching and painting requires you have a very good eye and a great command over the medium you are using. You need to be swift and loose while sketching, taking in as much of the detail as you can in a sweep, but not trying to make the sketch look very grand or precise. I decided to use watercolours as my medium. I am a complete illlterate( if you can call it that.) when it comes to watercolours, having worked most of the time with charcoals, pastels and pencils. But after seeing some outdoor watercolour studies of some awesome artists, I decided to give it a shot.

I was pathetic. My brushes were wrong, perspectives crappy and when something seemed to turn out fine, one loose brush stroke sent a gust of water on the good part, ruining the effect. One of the reasons watercolour attracts me is because it is such a lightening fast medium. You have to work with the flow, fast, mixing colours on paper. And there was where I was going wrong. Being accustomed to work on detail, I concentrated more on one part of the painting, the result being that some entities on the painting would be reasonably good, while the remaining parts went wrong.

Flared up by the eminent failure in the task, I went on practising. The first thing I did was changed my paper and brushes. I got a handmade watercolour paper which holds water for a longer time. My brushes were old and starting to fall apart, so I got new natural ones. I went on observing other watercolour artists, and concentrated on the technique more than the end result. Here are a few studies-

Landscapes are a beautiful genre and watercolour landscapes are amazing to work upon. And exceedingly difficult. After many attempts, I did this one for the Different strokes from different folks challenge, but didn't post it because the challenge ended before I could do a version which satisfied me. Here it is-

One more landscape which I did yesterday, to study some wash techniques-

These are some of the paintings I did in the last few days. I was too bored to upload them then. But today I decided to do it atlast. I'm having a lot of fun with watercolours nowadays and I can't wait to go back to Pune again and do some more outdoor painting.