cactus [2/100]
Still doing more stuff with wet on wet v. wet on dry technique. Here’s a tutorial I tried out.
Doesn’t look terrible, but you can compare it to the original:
Hehe. I think this guy specializes in painting flowers in watercolor with few, precise strokes. You can see him pushing the water around and controlling where the pigment ends up to achieve smooth gradients and subtle shadows.
One thing that would probably help me to achieve the same outcome is if I had real watercolor paper, because I could work the paint for a lot longer. For now I use nice-quality sketch paper that seems to tolerate water relatively well, but it’s not the same as watercolor paper. While I was adding other leaves to the cactus, the leaves I started with dried up so it wasn’t possible to keep on pushing the pigment and adding more to the base.
A good exercise would probably be to limit myself to one leaf or shape at a time and see if I can achieve the same sophisticated look with practice.
Actually, I do have several sheets of watercolor paper, but they’re expensive (like 12 in a single booklet..) so I’m saving them for when I feel confident and can use them to their full potential.
You can have a sneak peek of what else I started painting here:
I actually started with the sketch on the left but I accidentally smudged some paint while erasing. The nice thing about gouache (among several other nice things I mentioned in the previous entry) is that you can reactivate the paint even if it dries with water, so you can smudge away accidental marks. With watercolor, once done is done and will be seen FOREVER. Anyway, I used some water to wipe off the smudges, but it left the paper damp and I had to leave the rest of it to dry before continuing on it.
