The painting that almost broke me…

This time I was hoping for a quick watercolour painting and was sadly mistaken, as everything just kept going wrong.

I was enjoying painting the clouds and have a good time, lifting the paint with a paper towel, well toilet paper as didn’t want to drive 30mins round trip to the shops.

I started to get a feel for the watercolour and was loving the way this one didn’t look like and undercoat.

My new pony hair brushes were holding plenty water and creating some nice affects with the paint.

Then the tape which I was assured would hold lifted like so many times before as the water got close to it, arrr.

My paper started to buckle, so I just removed the tape all together as it was doing little to nothing. It did however give me some straight edges as a boarder.

As I looked back at the sand I realised it was a little dirty and dark. It also had dried, so was a little hard to lift out with water and my paper towel substitute.

I really wasn’t feeling this painting and had a little rant on my Instagram and Facebook account and went to bed and watched a few Christmas movies on my iPad. Yeah Yeah I’m a softy at heart, I call this character building for my next girlfriend haha.

Over night I soaked the back of the painting and placed grease proof paper then book to weight the painting down and flatten it.

This seemed to give me a flat working surface again, which was a good start.

Also thank you to all my social media friends for encouragement to keep going with this painting as I almost gave up on it a few times.

I did find a little bit of calm re working the clouds and day dreamed about how much of a good walk it was with friends, those many years ago.

I managed to fix the sand with a little white paint and lots of tiny sand grains. If you look closely you can see the multiple foot prints I placed in the sand.

For me what really saved this painting was the foreground bushes, and all the tiny rocks and the rusty wheels.

I was thinking of painting a little animal somewhere but I really just wanted to move onto something else and get back to my Gouache.

As my friends say, it’s still a nice painting and will appeal to someone but I just can’t see past the frustration it caused me with the paper buckling and the tape not holding.

I have bought better tape since and my friend has told me to soak the paper overnight so I shall give that ago once I return to the water colour next week.

I’m going to leave the price open on this painting and just say “Unframed make an offer” as I can’t charge much for something I’m not happy with. So if it appeals to you, make an offer and it’s yours.

I guess we all have our bad days and this was a few of mine. Saying that I was determined to bounce back and I did, over the next 3 days I created one of my finest works to date, a little green tree frog but as they say “thats another story.”