Watercolour
My desk isn’t tidy, but
everything I need is within
(mostly) a hand’s reach!O
ver the past three years
I’ve returned to using
traditional media,
having spent over a
decade painting
digitally. I hadn’t used watercolours
since college and I have completely
fallen in love with them
One of the things I like about
watercolour is that it’s impossible to
recreate the same effect. If I were to
attempt to paint these dragons again
from start to finish, they wouldn’t
look the same. This uniqueness is
very appealing to me. Chaos rules on
the paper, and the water and pigment
teach you to let go and not be too
precious about the outcome. Happy
accidents are frequent and sometimes
will add beautiful shapes and
textures to a painting that you hadn’t
necessarily planned.
However, in the same moment you
could end up with a ruined painting,but you just take a deep breath and
start again from scratch. Sometimes it
doesn’t go as you planned, but that
doesn’t matter – you’ll learn
something for the next painting!FULLY FORMED DRAGONS
My sleeping dragons painting has
been created for the cover of my 2020
calendar, which is launching on
Kickstarter this month. I love the idea
of a big snuggly pile of dragons and it
beamed into my brain almost
completely fully formed. The sketch
part was fairly easy, although did take
quite a while to get all the dragons
balanced and make sure the
composition kept the eye moving
around the page.
One thing that I changed, which
helped this enormously, was the tail.
The pointy end of the tail was at one
time sweeping away from the group
of dragons towards the lower left partof the page. As soon as I changed this
so that it pointed towards the central
dragon head, it altered the feel of the
composition completely.
I had a big challenge with painting
this and had to change my method
slightly because of the red pigment.
Usually, when I paint with
watercolours I can paint in thin
washes without the lower dried layer
moving or lifting. With red pigment,
even with the ‘permanent’ ones, it
seems they were determined to lift!
So I had to approach each dragon
individually compared to my usual
technique, which is to work on many
areas of the painting as I go along. It
has been a brilliant experience!EMBRACE THE CHAOS
OF WATERCOLOURS
EMILY HARE shows you how she paints a snuggle of dozing dragons using
watercolour, a medium that results in no two paintings looking the same
Emily is inspired by fantasy,
folklore and fairytales.
Working mainly in
watercolour, she’s published
three books and you can see more of her art
at http://www.emilyhare.co.uk.ARTIST INSIGHT
SLOWLY BUILD UP
YOUR WASHES
I’ll spend many hours
building up my
watercolour washes
until they’re as
saturated as I want
them. You won’t be
able to lift some
pigments after putting
them on to the paper.In depth Embrace watercolours