Explore watercolour

In this, my final article on refining your approach to watercolour, I thought it would be useful to look at the execution of a painting from a reference photograph. I’m grateful in this, to one of my students, Carol, who chose a view of Polperro harbour from which to work then allowed me to critique her painting and to make some modifications to it.

Let’s look first at the original photograph (, left) and the considerations it raises. It’s obviously a strong composition, with several major shapes and an assortment of minor ones. We are looking up at the jetty from the estuary floor, producing quite steep pitch lines to the eaves and ridges of the buildings, two of which have dribbles of light on their top left-hand corners, where they, and a corner of the jetty, poke out from the shadows