I have been tinkering with painting in watercolor since last year. I took a couple of watercolor classes with Ray Stouffer last spring and fall (2023), focusing on water scenes and landscapes, and more recently, with Willard (winter, spring 2024).
Painting with watercolor, to me, is more difficult than acrylic. I have to be careful about wet vs dry painting. Sometimes the colors mesh together if I don't allow them to dry first before adding the next color. Using a blow dryer on the low setting helps speed up the drying process.
My son gifted me a calendar of gardens recently, and I attempted to paint a few of these gardens. Here are my latest two watercolor paintings using the Renesans watercolor paints:
Here, I have painted these scenes in various stages and layers. I used 140 lb cotton paper. I normally sketch the design first with a pencil. The paint always looks darker when you first add it to the paper, and then when it dries, it appears lighter.
I painted a section, let it dry, then painted another section, etc. They say to paint the light colors first and later the dark, so that is what I did. I added layers upon layers for texture. I used different brushes with different sizes. When something needed more definition, I used a dry brush.
It took me about 2-4 days of painting to get these perfected, and the work is never done. I sometimes stop, even though I feel it can still be worked on, so I don't ruin them. With watercolor, I learned that I cannot really paint over my mistakes, whereas with acrylic, I can. Acrylic paint is more forgiving. That is what makes watercolor so challenging and rewarding.
I started with the Grumbacher Academy paints in 2023, but switched a couple of months ago to the Renesans paint. What I like about the Renesans paint is that it is more vibrant than what I had been using before, and it has honey in it. It's made in Poland.
