Learning from my mistakes!!

Plessey woods.

Arches watercolour paper, 15x11"

M.Grahams watercolours. 

This painting is based very loosely on a photo that my husband took at plessey woods last week.
I tidied the area up a little, and moved a few trees around. This was just a quick practice painting. I will paint it again someday, but next time I will make sure that the shadow of the tree nearest the river, doesn`t join up to the trunk of the tree in the foreground. It just looks like a huge branch sticking out from the foreground tree.

Newcastle quayside in warm Sepia.

15x11"

Watercolour on arches rough paper.

This painting was a nightmare from beginning to end.............The sheet of paper I used was years old, and I think the size was ruined on it. I had areas where the paint wasn`t blending properly, the paper was lifting in other areas, all in all I struggled. I got to the point where I almost gave up on it, and I was about to bin it, but decided to carry on.........it was prctice if nothing else, and my theory is you learn more from your mistakes than when everything goes to plan.

I Had a very dark cloud on the left hand corner, where the paint hadn`t blended, so I took a magic eraser sponge and softened and lifted some colour, to give the impression of softer looking clouds. This made a huge difference already. Next, I wet the whole page, and painted a very thin glaze over the whole painting to tie it together.

I did have a shard of light on the buildings, but it didn`t look  right, now that I`d changed the clouds, so I blended in some paint to hide it. I also strengthed the reflections in the water, and generally tidied to whole painting up..................and although it`s no masterpiece, it looks a whole lot better than it did before, and I`m quite pleased with it now, considering how it started off.

Cullercoats Bay, looking across to Tynemouth Priory.

15x11"

Arches rough, 140lb.

M.Grahams watercolours.

This was painted on part of the same piece of damaged paper, that I used for the above painting, but this time I was able to control it, because of what I`d learnt from the previous painting disasters.

The bell tower in the foreground is part of the RNLI building at Cullercoats Bay. When we were there a couple of weeks ago, we watched the lifeboat team rescue a car that had got stuck in the sea as the tide came in.