http://www.painters-online.co.uk/gallery/art-view,picture_141169.htm?cm_pg=2 I was pleased with the reaction to my Old Blackgang Road watercolour, and it was Bill Cook's remark that the painting at first made him feel it might be an acrylic that is prompting this blog entry (not sure I really write blogs: they're more mini-articles - the old journalist pops out now and then). There are assumptions we make about watercolour because we're used to seeing a particular way of painting them. There are those who have always painted in watercolour and have a profound respect for the many traditional ways of applying it: nothing I have to say is intended as disrespect to them or the traditions they value - in fact, I love traditional watercolour, for its transparency, clarity, and the way it can reflect light. I am not too good at painting like that, because I'm not a traditional watercolourist at all, and took to it quite late in life; I actually started out by painting in oil, then in acrylic; so when I first had a crack at watercolour (I still don't quite know why I did) I tended to try painting dark to light. That is emphatically not the right way to paint in this transparent medium, for obvious reasons, if you wish to follow the traditional, classical route: because the only way you can do this is to employ either masking fluid or body colour (as we doubtless all know, body colour is paint mixed with white or in which white has been mixed in manufacture - so it's gouache, or opaque watercolour). I have learned better by now than to paint from dark to light intentionally - it can cause massive problems with watercolour, your pictures get darker and darker, you can't achieve detail, things get lost against slabs of deep darks. Even so, because I've not been trained in the traditional methods of applying watercolour, I do sometimes, even often, slip back into techniques more suitable for acrylic and oil: and have then either to tear the paper up (I hate doing that!) or use techniques such as scratching out, lifting out (avoid the dyes if you're going to do that on a regular basis - colours like pthalo blue and green, and prussian blue, sink into the weave and are hard to lift out with water), or even taking a putty rubber to the paint. Or of course, one can use gouache - the snag with that being that the picture looks less and less like a watercolour the more you employ it. Eventually, I realized why my watercolours weren't working, and started working from light to dark instead - but while I could then begin to compete with the traditional watercolourist, I couldn't produce anything that was recognizably "me"; and I just wasn't as good as the traditional painters: to this day, I have trouble mixing light, delicate washes. It's said that watercolour washes dry two or three times lighter than when you apply them - well mine don't! I don't have the feel for watercolour that would cause me to recognize it as a distinct paint with its own properties, at least not to the extent required. I thought of it as just another paint - just another means of putting colour on a surface: and when it didn't behave, I attacked it; with salt, fingernail or pen-knife (I never graduated to anything so subtle as a scalpel), kitchen towel; I drew into it, added pastel to it, mixed opaque white - not Chinese white - into it. I did things with watercolour that would make a purist's soul shrivel, and I did it because I really didn't know any better. What I've got now is a fusion of methods that I would never have arrived at if I'd started out the right way. I do now paint from light to dark; I hardly ever use masking fluid; I've largely abandoned drawing into the paint with pen or pencil, or adding pastel - I've become sufficient of a purist myself to want to start and finish a painting in watercolour. But I do use opaque colours, sometimes a bit of salt, and the pen-knife is always to hand: I employ Naples Yellow, never white now, and introduce Light Red (also opaque) to it, and can modify this colour and darken it - I can take pthalo or perylene green and introduce that to the Naples Yellow; at a pinch, I can use Yellow Ochre instead of the Naples; and I use Cadmium Yellow, and Turner's Yellow; and I can thus paint opaque lights over darks - for branches, and to a degree for foliage (although the more freely you use these opaque colours, the more of a horrible mess you can get into: I would never use opaque paint in a watercolour in mass - use it for detail and fine touches, where you might otherwise have used masking fluid had you sat down and thought carefully about where you want your lights and details to be). In general, I don't believe most painters in oil and acrylic plan their paintings with the care required for a traditional watercolour - we experiment, let things grow in front of us; we might scrape paint away if it isn't working, especially in oil, but we might also just let it dry and then paint over it. That's how I learned to paint, and that's what I tried to apply to watercolour - it didn't work, but I learned a lot by doing it. I don't recommend my methods; but if sometimes I manage to convey energy in a watercolour, movement and dynamism, this is how it's been done: learning the wrong way, and using watercolour opaquely, has given me a freedom I might not otherwise have had. Fighting the paint and trying to bend it to my will (and of course, you can never guarantee success there) certainly taught me what I couldn't do, but also helped to discover things I could do with this medium. So .... if my watercolours often look at first sight like acrylics, that's the reason: I started out by trying to treat them that way - and when they work - they don't always! - they may not look much like classic watercolours, but at least I can recognize them as mine; and am hoping that one day this painfully derived technique will give me a painting I'm happy with and evolve further into a method I could actually recommend. It's still trial and error at the moment: I doubt that watercolour will ever be my main medium - but for good or ill, that's how I got to where I am at the moment.