Back in April I decided I would like to have a go at sketching and painting. I have often thought about trying to do watercolour painting but my natural tendency towards perfectionism and my inability to carve out time for such activities has always put paid to those ideas. Back in Primary School – 50 or so years ago – I was quite into drawing and painting (without any particular flair) but in the intervening years I have hardly picked up a sketching pen or paint set. So, it was a bit of an impulse decision when I decided to work my way through a free video course on drawing and painting with ‘loose lines’ earlier this year. The course consisted of ten short videos that gave prompts to follow and, importantly, encouraged imperfection and embracing of mistakes (one of the practice tasks included instructions to deliberately make mistakes which I will admit I found hard to follow).
After just a few days of working through the course I was branching out to do more ambitious pieces and soon found myself starting to develop my own style. Since then I have been producing pictures on a fairly regular basis – mostly quick (15-30 minute), small watercolour landscapes and usually with quite a lot of detail put in with black ink. Producing these little works of art has been something I have greatly enjoyed and even though I say it myself the final pieces have been pretty good and certainly much better than I expected them to be given that I have a complete lack of technical training and zero experience to guide me. I just try things out, play and see what happens.
Over the weekend just gone I sat down for half an hour or so and decided I would have a go at producing a watercolour painting without doing what I usually do which is to first draw out the subject in a fair amount of detail in ink and then subsequently add more detail in ink on top of the paint. I have called this a ‘minimal ink’ watercolour (I did put a few small details in after I had completed the painting). I chose a photo of a stone circle on Dartmoor as my subject matter. The result is the picture at the top of this post and it is one that I am really pleased with. I am pleased with the sky as I have captured the colours and cloud shapes better than any sky I have painted previously and I am pleased with the oranges and pinks in the colour of the moorland. Most of all I am pleased that I have extended the range of my art a little more by limiting my use of ink and creating something that is a little less detailed and a little more impressionistic. It is certainly a style that I will have a go at again sometime.
Tim O'Hare 