How To Plan Your Watercolour Washes 7

PLANNING WASH SEQUENCES AND MANAGING EDGES
Video 7 - Jetties & Reflections

I'm getting close to finishing this series of videos, where I paint a complex scene of the River Arun in Sussex, using it to demonstrate the importance of planning our watercolour washes, which will enable us to manage the edges of shapes in our paintings - an essential watercolour technique.

In this penultimate video, I focus on putting more work into the jetties on the right-hand riverbank and the reflections in the river. I use a negative painting technique to describe the supports and structures of the jetties, by painting the darker tones of the riverbank around them. Using a combination of lifting out some dried paint and then adding a glaze to the river, I demonstrate how to render the reflections with subtle detail, without becoming too complex. Although this area of the painting contains a considerable amount of detail, the ability to strike the right balance in simplifying the scene is important: too much and the interesting combination of light and dark shapes is lost; too little and the area becomes a confusing, busy mess.