My First Watercolor Picture

My First Watercolor Picture 8x11 watercolors on "watercolor paper"

For my birthday this month, my brother & his family gave me a wooden chest full of art supplies. The chest has 12 colors each of watercolors, acrylics, oils, pastels, oil pastels and colored pencils. It's sort of overwhelming, as the only medium I'm "comfortable" with is oil paints. I'm going to give all of them a try using this same photo.  The art chest also came with two 8x10 "canvas panels" and a pad of "watercolor paper".  So, I can stop when the paper and panels are used up. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

This is my first try at painting with watercolors since I was in public school 'way back in the 50-60's. About the only thing I learned was that I needed a BIG bowl of water. The rest of what the art teacher tried to tell me is dis-remembered.  For this painting I worked from a photo (of course) that I found somewhere on the WWW.

I learned a bunch from this first painting- first of all, there isn't a real WHITE paint in watercolors. WHAT? I need to plan ahead and use a potion called Frisket (WHAT?) to cover up the areas that I want to be white or not colored with the paint I'm using at the time. I need to think and that's going to be a problem. :-) WHAT? I thought that watercolor paints came in little cakes, not in tubes! WHAT?

Ken B.

PS the chest came with one really dinky eraser. I'm going need one of those gigantic electric power erasers, I think. Maybe if I can put an eraser in my electric drill . . . . .