How to Ruin a Painting - 101

Ok, so the title is a li'l over damatic, but I'm going to show you step by step how to ruin a painting...
All was going well until STEP: #5 onwards...

So,
STEP # 1:

painting of a whale - process

Take a spare watercolour board and draw the picture, sketching with the paint to show definition... Got it?

STEP # 2:

Decide on some bright colours to use and continue building up layers of brightness.
Remember your motto, "Expressing life through colour..."



STEP # 3:

Continue with layers of bright and vivid sunset colours.
This painting now takes shape and is working out rather well...
This would have been a good place to stop and reconsider
the options.


STEP # 4:

Going gangbusters - the whole painting is coming together nicely. Then, this is probably where you should stop and call it quits by doing nothing more on the background... If you've been fortunate enough to get some honest feedback, you probably would have been told to concentrate just on getting the whale defined...


STEP # 5:
This is where it all goes horribly wrong...
Know when to stop! Don't think by adding some more red colour to the sunset sky that it will liven things up more.
And, PLEASE, if you're using vivid transparent colours - don't go randomly using pastel and opaque - (colours that cover up the areas already painted)




STEP #6:

Perhaps this should come under the title " How to rescue a ruined painting"..?
So this is where I am up to on this and totally stuck... I've painted over the lighter colours with mixes of paynes gray, permanent purple madder, quinacridone red violet. Repainted the sea and sky with yellow to diffuse the intense red "hit" of the previous pic but I'm no longer enjoying the process. I'll give it one more go and then decide if what I've done has worked. Otherwise I'll start another whale picture on actual acrylic board instead of watercolour board.
Thanks for your patience Callie - one of these months, you'll have a whale from New Zealand hangin on your wall...



Art Expression