Watercolour Tips III

Not all water colour paintings need to be precise. You can create fabulous results with a more lose aproach. What you have to watch out for, is to avoid layering different colours endlessly. It loses the effect and it may result in loss of brightness.

The colours tend to dull when mixed too often. What makes it brighter is the fact that you keep layering the colours in proximity. For example, if you painting cold colours then blues could be mixed to give it an enriched texture. If you're to apply a different colour, then it can it either move towards green or purple.

But mixing green and purple can be more difficult and this should be experimented on the side before laying the watercolour onto the final paper. If it still seems difficult or odd, try colour harmonies.

Edmund Dulac

What I find interesting about Edmund Dulac is that he arrived toLondon a little bit later, as the color seperation was refined, and didn't struggle with that problem. This is early 20th century.


And he worked for the same publishers as Arthur Rackham, Hodder and Stoughton, but he made use of his paintings at an Art gallery in Leicester, before selling the reproduction rights to H&S.


This is an illustration of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and just one of many examples of how rich his colours were.

School Art Project

After getting my F10's to do some research, each one read a couple of H.C.Andersen's fairy tales and managed to choose a couple idea/sentences.

Now I was really amazed, as these teenagers and I put up a blog, and the results have been quite unexpected. Not all of them have put up their Frank Miller experiments but their are a few, and looking good.

The Final piece is a couple of weeks away. But the stories that can be found there are tales such as, The Little Mermaid, The Metal Pig, The Emporor's New Clothes, The Wicked Prince and other Andersen Tales. Just check the link of wicked-art-work.

Watercolour Masters I

The true masters from the past certainly came from painting techniques in China and Japan. I’ve seen some quite fabulous.

But there are many paintings that appeal to me. This first time I got seriously interested in watercolour, was when I saw some of Arthur Rackham’s paintings of Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll.

These illustrations, from 1907, are gorgeous. The one with Alice and The Pack of Cards caught my eye, and from then onwards I haven’t stopped learning and getting to know some brilliant artists from the Golden Age of Illustration.

Watercolour Tips II

Sketching is great to plan ahead. If you don’t want those pencil marks to come through, then practice the composition. Get the idea into your head before. A rough drawing can give you the outlines and eliminate some difficulties.

You can always light line the final with a pencil, but if you can manage without it, then super. If not, then it shouldn’t be a problem. I personally use pencil in my watercolours but the end result is meant to be a bit different.

I like introducing different media to create different textures and contrast. But I have done it without pencil and it really is unique. You have to be precise, not just for colour choice and mixing through layers, but also where you put it down on paper.

Watercolour Tips I

Watercolour is great for painting but it does require a bit of experimentation before you get the hang of it. And to really get control over it is quite challenging and very demanding.

Also known as aquarelle in French, watercolours tend to be worked from the palette but you can often work sometimes directly from the paints. Slowly, we coat the paper with layers of colour. Unfortunately, the rule says that one should work from light colours to dark.

This has a reason to be. If we blurt a dark colour in the wrong spot, there’s really little or no way around it.

We can never forget the water cup as there’s nothing worse than a mucky paint tray. So keep those brushes clean.

H.C.Andersen Fairy Tales in Frank Miller style

Since I teach a class of F10’s, I decided to put them up for a challenge. The idea isn’t new, I had already done this a couple of years ago, and it came out quite well.

At the time, when it was done, the students had only one story, entitled The Wicked Prince by Hans Christian Andersen. The Tale is about a Mighty Prince that ends up defying the church and God himself.

There’s a scene where the prince builds a ship with canons and it’s risen in to the sky pulled by eagles to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They fire upon an angel but the bullets rebound and the angel lets a drop of blood fall on the ship.

This drags down the ship as the blood is of hundreds of weights. The prince almost perished in the event but was intent to defy the Lord.

The end of the tale is quite humorous and the Prince is defeated. In this Art project, they get to choose a story, and select a description that may visually appeal to them for their Interpretational study.

This project will have an outcome in about six weeks or so. Let’s see what happens