Day 11 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
Painting with watercolors is all about achieving depth through layers. You learn to think in stages, planning and blocking off white space, setting down light washes, waiting patiently for them to dry, and then resisting the urge to keep them just as they are, working up the resolve to paint right over the tops of them, giving the piece depth. Preventing it from lying there, pretty but flat.
As an exercise, prescribed in a book, you choose two colors, blue and orange, their light and dark cousins, and you paint leaves and branches, petals and buds. Each layer filling the page, but also submitting, ready to be overwritten by the next, like transparencies placed on the glass. The result should be like a handful of wildflowers, you’re assured, tossed in the air and let to lie where they fall.
But the last layer is too vivid, too Cookie Monster blue. You wait, paint over it, and now the color is right, but the forms are heavy-handed: slopping handfuls of wet seaweed slung atop all the rest. So it’s not what it was meant to be. But underneath you see some of the depth you were going for. You think, yes, next time, I’ll choose that midnight blue color from the start. I’ll make test swatches, use more delicate shapes. Next time it will be better.