Not strictly true I know but I did recently spend some time pouring over a couple of my Rowland Hilder books and was also able to carve out a little time to do a few sketches too.
Not too long ago I picked up a Winsor and Newton Artists Field Set that included a range of Cotman Watercolours. I’d previously been a bit sniffy about this kind of set as I already have an abundance of small enamelled metal palettes that should serve the same purpose more than adequately.
Funny thing is, from the moment I started using this small field set, I really loved it! It’s fabulously compact and, because it has the capacity to attach a small water carrier to it too, it’s all so brilliantly portable (although the brush small brush that came with it is comedy tiny!). To start with I just did a couple of quick sketches in an A5 sketchbook:
Anyway, I was so heartened by the couple of sketches, not to mention the fact that it felt great to be painting rather than just ‘thinking about getting around to painting sometime’ – that I decided to upscale a little. I subsequently did three further Rowland Hilder studies but this time on quarter imperial oatmeal tinted bockingford paper. Again, I really enjoyed working on these although I think the results are a little mixed. I thought that the tiny palette coped pretty well with this size of work – but I think this is also as large as I would want to paint using this field set.
My plan now is to choose a couple of the images from this little collection and to repeat them using the artists watercolours to see how much of a difference I can notice! The paintings are shown here in the order that I painted them – and the ones I’m most likely to have another bash at are 3 and 5 but let me know if you’ve a preference for which you’d like to see me make another attempt at.
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