Watercolour of Son Maria, Lantsch

Son Maria, watercolour

You find this picturesque church in the Swiss village of Lantsch/Lenz in the Grisons. It lies on a hill just outside of the village and made a nice focal point for this mountain landscape.

I was struggling to get the separation of the foreground from the background, as the tones on the reference photo were very close together. I hope I managed to imply some distance by using warmer yellows for the foreground meadows.

Watercolour of Mountain Landscape Step by Step

I thought rather than posting in the finished result, I would show the different stages of this painting. The inspiration is a photo of a view of Zorten (Switzerland)  nestled in a mountain valley.

I usually start with the sky, but decided to lay in the foreground first, keeping the greens on the yellowish side to make them appear closer.

Next, I painted the sky and the distant mountain range. For the mountains, I used cerulean blue mixed with raw sienna, which greys the blue rather than turning it green. After that, I filled in the forested mountain in the middle ground, using cobalt blue mixed with phthalocyanine green and raw sienna.

Finally, I  added more detail to the far mountains, mixing cerulean blue with permanent alizarin crimson. This gives a nice greyish purple.

Mountain views are great to paint, as they make compositions easy, providing lots of zig zag lines.

Windsurfing on the lake

Watercolour

The windsurfers provide a splash of colour for this mountain scene.

Watercolour is known as a medium that can't be corrected, but I managed to wash out and repaint the mountains, as I changed my mind about the colours to use. If the paper is of good quality, a correction is certainly worth a try.

Three Cows

I saw these beauties in Lenzerheide (Switzerland) in August and knew I had to paint them. As artists, I suppose we are always looking for pattern and variety, which we find here in that they are all cows but differently coloured.

Stair Hole Bay

Stair Hole, Dorset, Watercolour

This is near Lulworth Cove in Dorset, a bay that is well worth a visit, although it gets really busy.

While the foreground was painted wet-in-wet, the rock structures needed more definition and were painted with several glazes. I also used a bit of lifting out with a rag in the dark shadow for added texture.

Durlston Country Park

Durlston Country Park, watercolour 

The Dorset coast is still providing me with numerous subjects to explore. To describe the texture of the rocks, I am using splayed brushes I drag over the paper, and lifting out paint with a rag wrapped around my finger. This knocks back areas that are too defined and the fingerprints add further interest to the surface.

I took the photo for this painting on our coastal walk from Swanage to Durlston Castle. This site will tell you more about this beautiful area and Durlston Castle itself.

Sailing Boat, Dorset

Sailing Boat, watercolour

I merged two different references for this painting, as I wanted to include a beautiful old sailing boat as a point of interest in this seascape. My husband remarked that it looked too near the beach, so might run aground any minute! Of course I could claim that the seabed drops very sharply on this particular stretch of the beach...

The water had a wonderful turquoise hue, which I managed to capture to my satisfaction; the main blue for it was Manganese Blue by Winsor&Newton.