In my work yesterday I started on my first watercolour drawing before leaving it overnight to dry properly. Today I hoped to get through stages 2 and 3 where all of the different ground features emerged and I'd have my chance to set about the central, and dominant, tree:
A curious feature of watercolour work is that the business is really broken up by the need to dry portions of your picture before moving on. I don't exactly mind this but it does rather drag out the process. Anyway today I moved down the page filling in hills, fields, hedges and grass banks hard in the foreground. Without a real scene to look at I found that this involved a lot of guesswork but that's not so bad sometimes; it was tricky with the tree though as I had to imagine just how much of a branch might be visible:
In the end I rather like this picture (as naive as it is) for being resolutely colourful and interesting. I doubt that any country scene has ever looked like this but I think that the background works nicely and is scaled appropriately. It's only with the main tree and the muddiness of the foreground that things fall apart; both the result of heavy-handedness I tend to feel. From the example it's clear that quite fine detail is possible in this medium but not for me just yet. Still this was a new experience which I'll be returning to no doubt.