Feeling forced to hit pause on photography during the pandemic introduced me to new challenges that reconnect me with my introvert personality. As stated in my previous post, contrary to my younger days, I welcome these challenges with curiosity and not fear.
One takeaway I'm getting from learning to work with watercolor is to respect the process. Watercolor is straightforward but complex; it involves anticipation and fluidity, and that takes a new mindset because having a clear idea of how a pigment will dry in combination with confident marks is what makes a watercolor picture harmonious and dynamic. With watercolor painting, there's no room for speculation.
I worked on these small watercolor paintings over the past week or so. These are far from being anything I can be proud of, but they show my struggle to understand how to approach this medium. Sharing them helps me visualize how to approach it from now on, and I hope it does the same for anyone else. In the first, I started the painting similarly to when I work with oils, giving me an end product that's flat and muddy. Realizing that, I then made a second attempt paying closer attention to layering from light to dark, but yet still, I felt it didn't convey the idea of atmospheric presence because I wasn't focusing hard enough on the tonal scale. On the third attempt, I chose to work with a monochromatic pallet consisting of French ultramarine with some strokes of burnt Sienna for better tonal values.
For the time being, it would be best for me to work closer from life, and concentrate on improving my drawing and observation skills before I rely on photographic reference when painting with watercolor. Gaining a good understanding of how its transparent qualities work that makes watercolor paintings stands on top of my list on my next batch of painting exercises.