I almost always start my paintings with a pencil sketch. I’m in awe of the watercolor painters who can just start painting on a blank paper and end up with something decent! I can’t do that. I need to sketch what my painting will look like, and I usually regret it if I don’t stick to my sketch. Improvising is not really my strongest skill.

It takes me a long time to get a sketch that I’m happy with. I use my ruler to get the proportions and symmetry right. I can see if such things are off, but I can’t fix them without a ruler. It also takes me a long time to settle on a composition. I need to see the whole sketch before I can decide if I like it or not.

I erase a lot. I should probably take a drawing class someday, but for now I just keep drawing and erasing until it looks right.

Then I carefully erase most of my sketch so the lines are barely visible. I don’t want the pencil lines to show through the transparent watercolor paint. Finally, I make a plan for what order I will paint each area. I can’t just wade in without a plan.

I’m usually happy with the way my paintings turn out, as long as I follow this process.

Sometimes I get impatient or try to change the plan halfway through the painting. Sometimes this works out, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Here’s an example of a perfectly nice painting that started out as a great sketch, but that went downhill when I started to improvise.

I added the bars in the window, because I wasn’t sure if that blue-grey area looked like a window. But I didn’t use a ruler, so the bars weren’t straight. So I tried to fix it by making them wider. Then I tried to make the whole painting look messier so it would seem like I did it all on purpose. Lol. Eventually I just gave up and decided I should stop trying to fix it. It wasn’t going to get any better.

The painting isn’t ruined, but it’s not as good as it was before I added the bars. I should have stuck to my original sketch, but I didn’t.

Oh well. As I’ve said every week of this painting journey – I’m doing this to learn! I do get frustrated when I can see something getting worse with each addition, but I learn a lot every time. And that’s why I’m doing this. 🙂