Over The Lake – Letting The Paint do It’s Thing (AKA so quick it feels like cheating…)

I got to searching last night for a bit of guidance on painting dark value images in watercolour, and stumbled upon this website. Wandering away from my initial search there are a lot of paintings in a very impressionist style – very much against fussing, and about Letting The Paint do It’s Thing. Something I am very good at in my sketchbooks, but very bad at when I am trying to finish a piece.

I set about playing with this idea inspired by one of her images.

I have been tentative in playing with the Daniel Smith Primatek paints I received for Christmas, as they are special, expensive and I was not quite sure what I wanted to do with them, but I made a point of getting them out today. The concept is trees across a lake (possibly Oregon, for some reason). I started with just to six colours in the Daniel Smith set, then explored others, creating a set of eight linked images…

Here they are:

I am very pleased with these, some of the most inspring work I have done for a while. And so quick, it almost feels like cheating – though actually very meditative while working fast, but actually thinking throught every mark…