The Whisperers

With those two jobs out of the way, I was ready to kick off my painting for 2022.  Be warned though, my first watercolour of the year is never great.  It’s always loose and random and just serves to clear the cobwebs.

There are four colours in this one.  There are formal debuts for hematite violet genuine, green apatite genuine and Mayan blue.  Transparent yellow is there to add a bit of light in places.
I didn’t want to spend too long outside, so there are no subtle techniques here.  I just wet the paper first, put on paint straight from the tube in all four colours using a palette knife, then smeared it around a bit using the knife.  I also used a wet brush to move some paint around and used the palette knife to scrape tree branches and rocks in places.  The sky was looking too green and too dark at one point, so I dabbed out lots of colour with a kitchen towel and added more of the purple and blue.
The green has dominated the other three colours but when two of those colours were a blue and a yellow, that may not just be down to the green apatite genuine.  The granulation effects are definitely interesting but using all three of the Daniel Smith colours might have been overkill – using just one along with a load of my more conventional colours might have been a better way to go.
Which is my way of saying this painting’s not going up for sale.  But it did blow some cobwebs away.
Oh, and Algernon Blackwood provided the title again.

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