Final Watercolor Landscape

Purpose: To use an demonstrate what you learned from the watercolor exercises you did in class to create your own landscape painting.

In my final painting, the techniques I used were gradient, watercolor pencil, salt over paint, and sponging. The watercolor pencil and the sponging techniques did not work out very well because their effect on the painting is not very visible. I tried to add the color pencil into the grass and the more-detailed trees but the colors did not show up very well. Also, using the sponge, I tried to make the land to the right of the river below the trees look more textured but the sponge did not create the effect that I wanted it to. Despite the two techniques that did not work out as well, there were two other ones that did. I used the gradient technique in the sky and I think that it worked out really well. It gave the painting a misty, cloudy effect which I really liked. The other technique I used that worked out well was the salt method. I used this in the bottom right corner on the end of the river and on a little bit of the land above it. The salt gave a good texture to that part of the painting which is what I wanted because in the picture I was working from, the water looked a little rocky and textured.
There are a few important concepts that I learned from this watercolor unit. When I first started this painting, I thought that it was difficult that we were only allowed to use two colors. As my painting started to progress, I started realizing that I could get many different shades of color from only mixing blue and yellow together. Another concept that I learned from doing this unit was to not add too much water into the paint or else the paint will run and the paper will curve. This lead to having to be extremely careful about not making any mistakes. With water color, it's almost impossible to cover something over once it's already been painted.