Bonfire on Beach - taking the mystique out of watercolor

So today we're going to paint a sun set over a beach with a bonfire on it that's the intention anyway and I'm going to use my katachi set which I'm just wetting at the moment and you can see some of the colors that I've recently been using there in the middle I think that was the lighted um window or something like that um it's very early it's not yet light I forgot to do this painting yesterday uh so I'm doing it now and I'm not sure how it's going to work out but um thing to do with a sunset is to uh start with light and I think that's the lesson I've been learning uh from this little experience here of light out of Darkness so I'm going to put this is very um what's the word uh experimental we're going to make the sunset the major part of this painting and that's the sun going down over the horizon and now I'm going to add uh increasing I'm working uh wet on dry this is a block of needen 8x7 no what is it 10x 7 in um cold press 100% cotton as you know when you paint um in watercolor and it dries it always dries lighter than you expect so we're going to start with those colors and I'm going to then come in with some purple that's not quite that strong in the top here and maybe some Indigo it's pouring with rain again you can probably hear it and then I'm going to run water between these two areas and allow the water to do the work and I have no idea how this is going to work whether it's going to work what I'm going to do at the moment to make it work I'll keep it fairly light at this side darker at this side um okay so probably need to pull out some of this color in a kind of random sort of way lighten it up a bit put a bit of it down here on the horizon make it a bit more natural and then perhaps drop in a bit more purple up here and then I'm going to [Music] run purple along the actual sea line okay so that's the horizon line now I need to go back to the Indigo I think for the um the sea line and put some Indigo along there and make it reasonably dark in a couple of places and then what I'm going to do is sort of bring the sea up to the beach don't want these things there particularly you might be able to make that look a bit better once it's dry um and then let's put a kind of dark greenish purplish um area here which we're going to call uh I don't know just call it something and when it's dry I'm going to put a a couple of palm trees there and then we will pick up some beige sand color and paint that in I'm just going to try to avoid that bit CU that will run like B heck so once we've got this color [Music] in I'll come up as close as I can yeah and then once this is dry we will add another layer to all of that so I shall and then the the bonfire is going to go here so this is a painting that is majoring on the light in the sky and um uh not so much on the fire we're going to put that in the front here so let's let that dry so I'm going to um use a bit of orange orangey red and kind of tidy up hopefully the uh the line here and sort of kind of make that look like that's the [Applause] Sun so remember that water is your friend [Applause] okay so we're just pretending there's a sort of small sun going down there on the horizon a little bit and not going to make a big fuss about that that's just a hint we'll let that dry and meanwhile um I want to attempt a couple of things the fire on the beach and put it sort of here here I think and I'm wondering how to best do that I'm wondering whether to use bit of gouache because I want it to seem quite light so I will go for some white squash um there with me I'm looking for a empty dish put bit of white brh in there and then we will mix in a little bit of yellow so lo and behold we have yellow GH and that's uh what's the word opaque a little bit more opaque and then we'll pick up some orange and add that we'll have opaque flames and then a bit more make it darker a bit more make it darker still I'm not going to go into a lot of uh fuss over this because doesn't Merit it and um then we going to go for some brown blackish Brown and we'll put some Stones here or maybe they've made a pile of stones and just put some logs in the middle for this uh fire on the beach and then perhaps with a little maybe a stick or something short I can find something we could put [Music] some texture coming up here and then let's go for um our darker Browns again to uh put some the beach and then May be a palm tree if this is dry I don't want them too big do we remember when I lived in the Bahamas used to paint a lot of palm trees not particularly easy they often had more than one coming from the same roote so to speak usually bits and pieces growing around the bottom of them sea sea grapes and stuff like that just leave it like that could put more maybe that wants to be a little bit darker just feed in a bit more black and and well we can we could we could [Music] um put in a few more kind of dots and dashes in the beach uh and you could put people if you wanted to but I think that that will basically do for today excuse me and I will let you go and there we are there's our it's not dry yet so I'll dry it and then uh take a photograph and put that up for your reference that was fun all before 9:00 in the morning and it's pitch dark here still pouring with rain and I hope you're having better weather than I am I am so I'll let you go bye now bye everybody bye-bye