watercolour links

Gonna work with watercolours mostly for a bit while I learn. The main reason is that with pencil it's more a matter of grinding it out - you can try something, figure out why it looks wrong, erase and redo, repeat n times until it looks passable. End result is as good as you're willing to strive for, but it can be a bit painstaking. Watercolour is very different, because its transparent nature means you don't have much lee-way to rework stuff - if it looks wrong on the page and you mess with it, it'll kick your head in more often than it will meekly submit like pencil does. So it makes me think more about what I'm doing, plus the upside is that it "paints itself" and does interesting things as it blends and dries, so I'm really keen to learn to harness these effects and have them do some (hopefully most!) of the work for me...


Here are two of my favourite watercolour artists so far:

Jack Reid - A Canadian guy who paints snowscapes mostly, really beautiful work, especially with the way he portrays water. Here's my attempt at recreating a painting from his book "Painting Snow and Water":










Paul Jackson This guy's a narcissist - either no-one told him watercolour isn't the best medium for creating highly detailed work, or else he got told but took it as a challenge. Produces the most incredible pictures, including a level of contrast that I hadn't realised was possible with watercolour. Here's my attempt at recreating a (relatively simple) painting from his book "Painting Spectacular Light Effects in Watercolor":