Our November demonstration event was thrown into chaos at the last moment, when the scheduled speaker had to postpone. We are very grateful to Catherine Beale for stepping up from her end of January slot. This did mean a few technical difficulties at the start, as all that preparation time had been lost, but Catherine nevertheless gave us an intriguing glimpse into the methods of her magical watercolours. As well as painting in her studio, she’s taken to painting on her holidays as a souvenir!
Catherine has won numerous awards for her watercolours, despite starting in oils. She thinks it could be because she still uses basic techniques for oils that are more or less unheard of in watercolour. She demonstrated this by using runnels from her paints on the piece to create more features within the landscape, or to cast shadows where there were none before. She also scraped or wiped off paint like a sgraffito effect.
She starts by dropping small amounts of her tube paints into the sectioned palette, which already has water in it. This leads to very little cross-contamination of colours through brush rinsing. It is a restricted palette, as most of the colours will be made on the page, and a lot of the actual shades and depths become a matter of serendipity. Some might call it chance, but of course it is also luck!
Unusually, she focuses on the effects of sunlight by including the sun as white paper. She chooses where the sun will be and leaves it empty. Sometimes she creates lighter patches in a scene using masking fluid, but mostly she’ll go with where the paint wants to leave gaps and build them into her landscape. Two exceptions she showed us were the hayfield, where the strips of hay left behind were masked before the darker earth colours went in, and the bracken in the woodland scene, which were masked over a lighter green that was darkened.
This is wet in wet with a vengeance. Her aim is to float the colour on the page, not to brush it in. This allows colours to flow together and create their own magic. She showed us how she manipulated edges and took paint from one patch to another, and even rubbed things out!
A few technical hints: She uses Daler Rowney Artfine watercolour paper or paper board, which she finds easier to work with, although there are many other brands. The same applies to paints: she uses a mixture of brands, but aims to get the more transparent ones. Avoid lemon yellow if you want to see through it. She also advised that Hobbycraft is discontinuing their stock of A4 paper; the smallest will be A3 in future. But you can get A4 at other outlets and online. I probably need to nip down to Hobbycraft for some A4 frames, in that case.
And a final practical note: remember to dial up the strength of your colours as they will dry to a paler tone.
Thank you, Catherine, for a very interesting demonstration at short notice!
