Gannet 5

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Living and learning with this sort of thing is the best thing about it - while I'd love to achieve instant perfection (and I never yet have) it would get boring after a while.

It was the best of times it was the worst of times......so far I was pleased with the result but trying to add the cliffs quickly dispelled any notions that this would be a doddle. Initially I planned to put on a wash of water, drop various colours into it then scrape back with a plastic card to produce a rock effect which works really well with watercolours. However, I found ink dries to quickly for that to work and resorted to having to paint by hand. Initially I tried various greys, then reshaped the cliffs to be more vertical and after various tries simply painted the whole thing out with tippex and was on the verge of giving up when I noticed that it had dried with a ridged effect that when washed with various browns and yellows actually created a reasonable effect so I went with it. It's amazing what you discover on the verge of quitting. However, it was to late to save the right hand side of the picture where I'd decided that a tall rock face would bring the cliffs right into the foreground. Big mistake, it killed the picture stone dead and the only action at that point was to cut the page back with a pair of scissors hence the now squarer appearance. Had it been a proper picture rather than an exercise in a sketch pad I would probably have simply redone the whole thing at this stage as I've never successfully cut and pasted paper/canvas to correct errors as I've seen done by others. However, whilst the end result isn't quite the disaster I feared the one thing I've learned at this stage is that no matter how bad things appear you can still rescue them so never give up until you've explored every option.