Today’s watercolor experiment:
I warmed up today with a warm and cool color juxtaposition exercise. Hopefully this prepared me fore a Turneresque study of a sunset.
The instructions in my Tate Watercolor Manual * said to lay down a cobalt blue sea and a yellow ocher sky, “strengthening” the warm yellow with cadmium red light and the cool blue with indigo.
Warmer Sky, Cooler Sea
The next task was adding clouds with a cooler red. A touch of cobalt blue added to the cadmium red light was supposed to do the trick. I added a lot more blue than suggested. I added distant cloud with the tip of the brush, again using the cooled-down red.
Completed Turner Sunsets
The top two panels show the added ‘clouds’. The result is not all too pleasing. I like the bottom two panels, however. The darkened reds are more cloud-like than the others.
I am glad that I didn’t use an entire sheet of watercolor for this. I will need to do many more small-sized experiments to improve my ability to render a believable sunset.
* Tate Watercolour Manual, Lessons from the Great Masters by Tony Smibert and Joyce Townsend
