A watercolour workshop led by Neil Pittaway at the Rich & Fancy Cafe in Horbury on Sunday was an opportunity for me to try some alternative techniques to my regular tried-and-tested approach.
I remember one piece of advice that I’d heard years ago which was that you should never paint with watercolour straight from the tube (or, in my case, the tray). Always mix the colour you need.
In the first exercise (top) we ignored that advice and painted swatches of the traditional primary colours – cadmium yellow, ultramarine and cadmium red – directly on the watercolour paper. When they’d dried off for a while we mixed secondary colours by painting another primary colour over each of them, so blue over the yellow gave us green and so on.
Further washes resulted in brownish or greyish tertiary colours.
We experimented with masking tape – Neil isn’t a great fan of masking fluid – then wet-on-wet washes and graduated washes.
For a final piece, predictably for an illustrator like me, I decided against the more spontaneous techniques – which included running the tap over your work! – and instead I went for a fairly controlled set of overlapping swatches, inspired by some Paul Klee abstract and semi-abstract watercolours we’d been looking at.
Link
Neil Pittaway painting, drawing and printmaking.