FREE And Intuitive WATERCOLOR Painting – Watercolor Mosaic Demo 1

Hello everyone, welcome back to my studio for another exciting week of watercolor painting. In this week’s painting we’re returning to French Riviera.

This painting demonstrates the incredible versatility and flexibility of watercolor more than anything else. It shows that watercolor can be painted many different ways, offering great immediacy and freedom.

Watercolor is the perfect medium for the creative artist interested in exploring their ideas. It allows for highly methodical approach or a completely spontaneous improvisation. Today I approach my painting in a different manner than usually and lean more towards the improvised approach.

My idea here is to explore pure color and clean washes that are hard-edged. I skip the initial preliminary drawing so that I’m starting on a clean sheet of paper. I want complete freedom. Even after years of painting it can be difficult to ignore these preliminary lines once they’re on the page.

While I don’t have any guidelines on my paper I do work from my value study. I do keep it at hand but approach it simply as a guide. This allows me to react more freely to what happens on the page. Starting watercolor this way can be almost transformative experience.

My interest at this stage of my painting is to start establishing shapes that suggest a shadow pattern.

But its true purpose here isn’t the explanation of light source. Rather it’s there to help me carve out one large white shape that spans the entire painting.

And so even though I paint my light blue shapes, all the time I look at the white space that remains behind. This is called negative painting.

This approach can have a fairly slow build-up. That’s why I start the painting with some anchor points first. These are the yellow tower domes, the top point of the fountain in the foreground and the little roof of the water well on the left hand side.

Once established, these few key locations help me gauge where I want to paint the rest of my shapes. Notice that I paint my windows as spots of color and I relate these colors to the elements already established on the paper. I want to create relationships among these shapes.

I especially consider their size and color. In terms of size, I take care to create variety. I want some familiarity and so I don’t need to make all shapes completely different sizes but there must be some sense of hierarchy. Notice that my domes are clearly larger than my windows and doors. This in itself suggests importance.

In terms of color, notice how I play warm and cool against each other. I’m not as much interested in the colors themselves, but rather the balance of warm and cool. I aim at a dominance. I want my painting to be cool-dominant. That’s why I’m starting my painting with warm accents first.

That is all for today’s painting session. I hope you enjoyed the video. Tune in to Part 2 and let’s find out how the painting develops. If you enjoyed the video, please leave a like, comment and subscribe and I’ll see you in the next one!