First Watercolour

When I was 7, I took a watercolour painting class. My mom was really into painting and wanted us to develop these skills as well. This past summer, I decided to try again. Luckily, I had most of the supplies from my mom.

I wasn’t sure what to start with but flamingo’s seemed easy so I decided to try them.

I started by finding pictures of flamingos online so I would have something to look at while sketching. I then remembered from my class that we would print off the pictures and draw a grid on it then draw a grid on my blank paper, to scale it, so we would know how big to draw each part of the picture.

I then went on to apply liquid mask to the areas that I wanted to be white.

Then I started experimenting with colours. I didn’t realize how hard this was. Trying to get the exact shade was extremely difficult, but then I realized you could keep layering all the difficult shades you came up with to try and enhance the photo.
The hardest part for me was the sky, the water and the sand. Trying to differentiate with colours and textures was extremely difficult for me and I still can’t say I am 100% pleased with it, but it will do for a first painting. To try and get the sand with a bit more texture I applied salt to the wet paint, which sucks the liquid out, but it wasn’t the correct texture for sand so I had to paint over it again.
To finish it off, I erased the liquid mask off, to reveal the white areas on the rocks and flamingo beaks.

I’m not going to lie and say I never got frustrated. There were many times when I had to take a time out from painting and do something else because nothing was working out how I wanted.

This was the finished painting.