Watercolour week!

Hello everyone!

This week we will be mainly focusing on watercolour painting, in which we will share with you what techniques we use and find effective as well as hopefully improving a bit ourselfs!

I got an idea for this piece from the expression 'you're pulling on my heart strings'.

First I roughly sketched out what I wanted in pencil once I had that and was happy with it, I then traced a version lightly in pencil using my light box and gently went over it with a rubber. I did this to avoid any pencil marks coming through the watercolour, now with this piece because it's supposed to be a real heart I wanted it too look as textured as possible which required a lot of building up my layers of colour with the paint I found using a dappling effect helped this. Now I don't know about you guys, but I find it tricky to make a painting appear like it's wet. The trick is not to forget about leaving some white spaces where it is needed because you don't want it to be tonally perfect without any depth or light reflecting off it. My last tip for you all is attention to detail is everything and watercolour painting is something you really need to take you time on if you want effective results.

Equipment used: Cartridge paper, Winsor & Newton watercolour paint set, Reeves watercolour set, Major brushes, Reeves brushes.

(I tend to use the sets of watercolours that you can buy replacement tabs for, I much prefer them and find that they last longer than tubes.)