Let Not The Sun

After finishing the Carrie McKenzie book, I thought I’d better have a go at a landscape using the crystalline watercolour. I picked a view along one of the roads through Queendown Warren as I wanted lots of trees against a background of abstract greenery.

I started by purring down a rough pencil outline to show me where the trees, fence posts and road needed to be. I should at this point have masked out one side of all the tree trunks as highlights using wither masking fluid or a wax candle. I later regretted this omission, ending up with a painting lacking in light areas.

Then I sprinkled crystals all over the page. For the first time I sprinkled them on through holes in the lids, as if adding salt to chips, rather than using makeshift spatulas. I tried to leave a lighter area in the middle of the painting but failed. I then sprayed over some water and used a small wet brush to mark in all the trees and fence posts. I grounded the trees and posts by dragging their colours into the grass verges. And I marked in the dark bit down the middle of the road with side to side strokes.

I was a bit disappointed by how light the tree branches had come out, so sprinkled over some more (dark) colours and, without spraying water, went over the trees, lists and verges again with a wet brush. This time I got the dark values I was after.

As a final step, I sprinkled lots more colour everywhere. There were, of course, some crystals already on the paper from my second step that weren’t inside the tree trunks. I sprayed a bit of water over, hoping to get a nice leafy canopy and some leafy shadows on the road. But it didn’t happen. Maybe I put down too many crystals or too much water but everything turned to mush. I tried adding some leafy shapes by dabbing at the canopy in places with a small brush but had no luck. Disappointed with the results, I dabbed at everything with a paper towel to remove all the water.

I tried an all or nothing gamble of putting on some granulation medium to see what happened. It didn’t do much other than running down the paper and bringing colour with it, so I dabbed all off. There’s still a bit of evidence, though, in the bottom left corner where I can see what look like tree reflections in the road. And I half heartedly spattered over some white gouache but you’d barely notice it was there. So I gave up.

This one’s a huge flop and won’t be going up for sale. I just hope I learn lessons from it, in particular the need to reserve whites before starting because crystalline watercolour is so badly behaved you can’t trust it with a job like that.