Here's something that took me ages to work out... ( waves)

I thought about what to put in my blog this week and, I thought I would start a small series of blogs about some very simple techniques. They took me a while to work out but  made life much simpler for me as a watercolorist. I must admit most things seem complicated until you're shown them and then you think, oh gosh, why didn't I think of that?

Today I'm going to do a very short blog on painting a wave. OK, as you can see. I've started off with a line of. Cerulean Blue., with a bit of indigo mixed in.

Then I painted another line underneath it. I'm using a dry brush so that you can see some of the paper coming through, but that's not essential.

Then I get some white acrylic. I put this on when When the paint underneath was a bit wet and that was a mistake. You can see it bleeding into the paint.

This is the white acrylic that I use, but I think any white acrylic would be fine.

So moving on. I add my white acrylic. And then underneath the white acrylic I paint with a very very dark line of Indigo. Can you see that this creates the shadow under the wave?

And then I wet my brush and I blend that dark. So that. It seems as if the wave is curling over. 

You can add some splatters and splots to show the wildness of the water, look at as many waves as you can to get a feel for them 

I promise you. That if you paint waves like this in the distance. You'd never need to paint waves any other way.

And where you leave little crests of white, which was the paper. If you just darken underneath again, you get a wave.

You can put these waves into larger seascapes, 

I hope this saves you a lot of time and effort that it  took me to work it out.I think all painting is a form of magic, and once you know some of the short cuts you can go on to create your own magic