Here we go again! Watercolor Freestyle! Commando!

Watercolor is about…get ready for it…WATER! The first thing you need to learn about watercolor is that you cannot control it. Well, you might think you can by tight drawings showing every shade or value change and you carefully head forward in a paint-by-number way. Oops, you have to jump around so two sections don’t bleed into each other. OH, NO. The colors mixed!

My comfort zone is between Commando and Tight. Sometimes I do a modified contour drawing trying to draw what I see without lifting my pencils…just going over lines to get where I need to go. My mentor, Charles Reid, perfected this method. He told me once that it helped him FOCUS on his subject and slow down a bit.

More often than not I’ll do a very loose sketch of the four largest shapes. s

SO, I decided to try to do the same general idea from Episodes 6a and 6b, but change the size of the paper and do vertical and double size.