It was a wonderfully bright sunny morning today so I decided to sit out the front of my house and have a go at a watercolour study. Now me and watercolours don't generally get along but they are a medium I desperately want to get better at, there's a subtlety about them which just can't be reproduced in any other medium. Computer programs like photoshop or painter aren't even close to being able to do the real thing any justice. Just like a music program trying to replicate the sound of a violin it always sounds flat and synthetic when compared to the real thing. I don't know if we'll ever be able achieve a digital reproduction of either watercolour or violin, they are just so variable and subtle that they can never be reduced to code.
So with all this going through my mind I set about roughly sketching the street with a water soluble pencil, in hindsight yellow was a bad choice but at the time I thought it would help accent the feeling of early morning sunshine. Now I'm not very good at planning a study and sketching the scene was about as far as I got with it, unfortunately this doesn't sit too well with watercolours and after putting in my basic shapes I'd already made the lights too dark and not spent enough time finding the highlights and leaving them paper white.
So I fell back on my standard rescue method...white acrylic. I would of used gouache but I ran out of white some time ago and haven't replaced it as it's a medium I use fairly rarely. Anyway so I started building up the layers and adding the details being careful to keep the distant houses as vague as possible. It took be about 2 hours to get to this stage and then it started to rain. I may return to it if similar conditions come around again but for the most part I'm happy with it as it is. An exercise in exorcising my watercolour demons.
