Learning to paint using watercolors was on my list for the year. I had some initial exposure during my second drawing course this spring – but I found it didn’t help me much.
I want to create beautiful images. Landscapes, European streetscapes, Mediterranean villages and the like. The course I took covered a few basics on color mixing, saturation and creating art with watercolors and colored pencils. I painted color samples, spheres, cubes, shadows, an eye and one portrait. Meh.
Now that I’ve finished my third drawing course, I decided maybe what I needed to do was paint. A lot. Like I did when I taught myself to do oil painting landscapes. So I did.
I painted a bunch of landscapes. They all sucked.
In my hunt for a watercolor painting course, I stumbled across a reddit thread where a guy posted watercolor art he created when he traveled through Europe.
It’s beautiful.
He sketched streetscapes, ruins, bridges, meadows, statues, parks and other sites he visited. In the reddit thread he answered questions on how he used pencil for the sketches, then waterproof black ink over the pencil, then finished with watercolors.
His sketches remind me of the magnificent animation in the “Triplets of Belleview” – which is my all time favorite animated movie due to it’s absolutely brilliant artwork.
I decided to copy his images to learn how to make art like this.
I did the same thing when I learned oil painting. I followed tutorial videos for months, then I copied other artwork I saw online until I finally developed a style of my own.
So far, I’ve sketched two scenes in pencil, outlined them in ink and painted them. It takes me a long time – several days for each. I have a feeling that it takes me much longer than the original artist.
But by the time I’ve done 20 of these, I am hoping I have a better handle on the process.
And then, I’ll take my next course – on watercolor technique.
I’m excited. I’ve been looking forward to this all day. My mind is full of thoughts about color, sketching, my trip to Barcelona in 2009 and what I imagine old Europe looks like.
This has been an absolute blast.
