Day 7

One thing I have discovered this week is that I have absolutely no clue how to paint water so that it looks like water. I look at the reference photo, I see the colors, I see the darks and lights, I try to mimic them...and it looks like a bunch of (badly) blended colors on a piece of paper, not like flowing water. In this case I don't think it's a matter of practice makes perfect: I think I'm going to have to find someone to teach me how to paint water, if I continue to want to do that.

I don't do a lot of landscape, never have been great at it. There are several reasons for that: lack of depth perception, a skewed sense of angles and perspective...I'm one of those people who knows intellectually that the table has four equal legs, and that knowledge makes it hard for me to paint what I'm seeing in front of me, which is probably two legs more or less the same length, maybe a third that's half as long, and a missing fourth. I look at the angle of a roof of a building, and I have to physically lay the pencil down on it to see if it is slanting from down to up or from up to down, because if I just look at it and guess, I will get it wrong, guaranteed.

Give me organic shapes, and I can follow outlines (although I'm also not great with foliage). I don't know why I can't do that with artificial structures, but so far, no dice.

Anyway, all of that was to say, today's drawing has bad angles, water that is not believable, and a tree that looks like something a kid would paint. But...I gave it a shot. (It would also have helped if this were on real watercolor paper—the sketchbook just wouldn't stand up to the multiple layers needed for the water, and it wouldn't let me leave the white sparkles that might have made the water more convincing.)

"30x21_Canal"—PJ watercolors in Bee mixed media sketchbook.