Super Sunday

During lockdown I took up watercolour painting after watching and being inspired by several of Paul Clark’s YouTube videos.  Once lockdown was over, I stopped painting until earlier this year when my Dad and I went to a beginner’s class locally.  I remembered that I really enjoyed it and started doing some extra painting in between the classes.  My friend fancied trying watercolour and mentioned about Paul doing workshops.  He’s just under a couple of hours’ drive away and there was a workshop we could both attend so we packed our gear and headed off.

During the first part of the workshop, Paul explained the advantages and disadvantages of the various papers, paints and brushes that you can get and then demonstrated how to paint rocks.  We also used a plastic card to scrape away at the paint and then added some reflected shadows in the sand.  We then practiced our dry brush technique, which we would use for the sea in our finished painting.

Next was a quick lesson in sketching, including perspectives and how to draw a boat, starting with an elongated figure 8 on its side, as this lady demonstrates in her video.

I’ve never drawn a boat in my life, (well not since drawing the simple yacht with 2 sails as a child!) and I didn’t have a clue where to start so I was really pleased with my sketch when I managed to add one.

Now, it was time to paint.  We started with the sky using wet on wet and then whilst that was drying, moved onto the foreground.  It was to be semi-abstract and involved lots of quick work splashing around colours, splatting and adding salt for texture.  Whilst that dried, we painted the cottage roofs as the sky had dried.  You can see my rocks in the bottom corner although it looks more like a dry stone wall.

We worked our way around the painting as areas dried and I was so absorbed in the painting that I forgot to take any more photos until I’d finished.  The final stages were to add the red pops of colour, add a few dark lines here and there and some grassy detail to the foreground.

Here I am with Paul himself - you can tell I had a fab time by my great big grin!He is a great teacher, very entertaining and encouraging, and if I lived closer, I would definitely enrol in his weekly classes.