Watercolor upgrade
by
I took up watercolor painting last April when I bought a little travel box of Sakura Koi watercolors. It came with a water brush and a removable palette that stacked inside. At the same time I bought some paper. I took the little box with me wherever I could and tried to paint what I saw, or at least what I felt I saw. As I experimented, I also got books from the library and watched YouTube videos to learn some technique. I took a free class, also at the San Francisco library.
Over the year, I kept picking up equipment and accessories. A few brushes here and there, collapsible water jugs, a cute little sponge, a rollup pencil case to serve as a brush case, a second, smaller Sakura Koi paint set that was more convenient to travel with, and a selection of clipboards.
It slowly came to my attention that I might want to buy some better paints. Watercolor paints, I learned, come in two grades: student and professional (sometimes also called artist). The professional grade paints are considerably more expensive. Similarly, watercolor paper comes in student and professional/artist grade. I have been, I admit, a bit cheap with the paper. A coworker who has been painting with watercolors for a while and is considerably more serious than me offered to have a little painting class during lunch and suggested I try her paper instead. It made a huge difference. For the first time, paint was behaving the way the books and videos described it, especially in wet-on-wet technique.
And so, I bought some professional grade, 100% cotton paper and a set of Winsor & Newton tube paints.
Since I got tube paints, I now needed a dedicated palette, and ideally a travel palette since I like to paint outside. So, again at my coworkers' recommendation I went down to Case For Making in the Sunset and bought a lovely travel palette and a bunch of empty half pans. Oh, and just a couple additional colors. I filled up my new palette.
This was a little test image I painted before I had prepared the whole palette. I couldn't resist trying the CfM colors right away, especially the Cerulean. A little dab of yellow from the tube gave me a nice green. And soon I had a happy little tree. My scanner does not do those colors justice.
On the following day, I took the whole kit out to Holly Park and wandered around until I found a view I liked.
I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I must regretfully report that spending more money on good paper and good paints does make for better results.
Even thought it was quite cool and windy, I had such a nice time that I painted one more thing.
I like the tree in my painting, though I wish I had managed to capture more of its distinctive shape. I keep trying to remember the lesson to use the landscape to create a watercolor rather than using watercolor to paint the landscape. Nonetheless, there are certain shapes and feelings of shapes I wish I could capture better.
That will just have to come with practice. I signed up for a landscape painting class this Saturday, also at Case for Making. One thing seems to lead to another. I don't regret at all that I started with the inexpensive all-in-one palette last year. Without it, I would not have discovered I like watercolor painting so much. Something about this medium inspires a light-hearted approach. People say watercolor is unforgiving; I can't say I've found that to be true. You can't always get it to do exactly what you want, but if you go with the flow, you might end up with something unexpected and beautiful anyway.
