What's your view?

I've finished my first watercolour landscape, which was spread over a couple of classes, with additional time at home!

This exercise was all about colour and distance, using a limited palette. Either a traditional palette of Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre, or a modern palette which uses Indian Yellow instead of Yellow Ochre.

I decided to go for the traditional palette, which I have to say I struggled with; but I did learn that not all Yellow Ochres are the same - the one I was using had quite a lot of red in it!

We were provide with an outline drawing we had to copy onto watercolour paper; this is a very simplistic landscape, incorporating lots of distant trees and hills - but I'd quite like that view out of my window!

Our first sky was all about distant rain - we've had quite a lot of that recently!

Here it is finished - I think my mid distance trees look like they have had a camouflage net thrown over them - apart from that I'm quite pleased at my first attempt!

I also decided to do a smaller version in the modern palette, just to see the difference. This paper was torn off an A4 pad, so it had some glue on the edges. I did this one quite quickly, but you can see the greens are much fresher.

I've learned a lot about colour mixing (particular greens), and also that painting trees is very difficult!

This week we moved onto tertiary colours (colours that contain every primary colour in different proportions), using complementary colour pairs. A way to get subdued colours, or greys and browns. I finished this chart at home yesterday - 66 squares in all!

Now I've got to do an outline townscape in prepartion for the next class, when we will be using tertiary colours.

Then it's half term - phew! I need some time to catch up on stuff - like housework! At least the dust is reaching a level when its worth doing!

Snowdrops and crocuses are out - happy February!