Failure is a good teacher

After a bit of a break from painting, I thought I would try some more watercolours today. The first picture is of some cottages in Islip, a village in Oxfordshire. This one started well, with a reasonably good sketch, but as is often the case with my painting, it sort of got out of control and I ended up making a mess of it. Most obviously, I stuck my hand in some wet paint and managed to smudge it onto the foreground road! The telephone/power lines are just shockingly bad and the details on the houses would have benefitted from more care. This painting isn’t actually “finished”, I just gave up when it became obvious I had made a mess of it!

The second picture is of Sugar Loaf near Abergavenny. It’s not an easy subject for a painting like this because it is so difficult to convey the sense of size and “presence” when there are very few visual clues telling us that the mountain is in the distance. I don’t think I messed this one up as such, but it didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it.

My point is, practice is never wasted if we’re honest with ourselves and prepared to learn. The first painting would have been so much better if I had just been a bit more patient with it and taken my time to add details (such as window frames, phone lines and guttering) more carefully. And not stuck my hand in wet paint…. The second painting I wasn’t too unhappy with (I like the sky), but I think would have benefitted from a cleaner and more decisive fore- and mid-ground. It will be interesting to try these paintings again with the benefit of hindsight and see if I can improve on my first attempts.