25 May 2018 I thought I'd try painting from real life. Well, I say real…
Waterfall Green
It’s been cold outside for the last week or so and I’m going through a phase where I’m too messy to be able to work indoors so there’s been a bit of a painting lull. Today, though, the sun was out briefly, so I went outside and painted this waterfall. I’ve been meaning to paint a waterfall ever since I bought the bottle of waterfall green ink that this painting is named after. In the meantime, the waterfall green made a sound debut in that painting of the sea at Whitstable. I’m actually glad I didn’t go for the waterfall straight away as the Whitstable painting experience told me that this colour ink isn’t a great runner and I wanted it to run down the paper to good waterfall effect. So (thanks to my earlier experience) I knew I needed to dilute the ink. I diluted it with something in a bottle that people dilute paint with if they want it to stay runny for longer – I expect Jean Haines buys it by the barrel.
I used all seven inks in this paintings but only four watercolours: Prussian blue, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta in the underpainting and titanium white for some splattering at the end.
And I’m happy with the result. It shows off the waterfall green colour as I was hoping, with complimentary reds in lots of places. The rocks at the bottom were scraped out with a credit card and (for once) worked well with some interesting colours showing up underneath. The sky worked out well, with a big white cloud framing the top of the waterfall (a happy accident). If there’s one thing I would do differently, it’s the trees up against the sky. I painted them in with the inks using the pipettes in the bottle lids; I’d probably have been better off painting them in watercolour using a rigger brush.This was the most popular painting in my Q1 2019 survey. Four years later it was donated as a raffle prize at the village coronation party to raise money to repair the church archway. And it was won by somebody called Enrique who wasn’t there at the draw but left his phone number. I hope he likes the painting. The real test will be whether the painting turns up as a prize at the next village raffle.
I’m starting to find that it’s hard (if not impossible) to go wrong with painting random abstract landscapes using acrylic inks over watercolour. It would be easy to just keep churning out paintings like this. But then I’d never develop as an artist. I need to start doing some normal watercolours.
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