Don’t give up! Some of my very early watercolour paintings. (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

I hope this post will inspire you to not give up!

The other day I was cleaning up and I found some of the paintings I did when I first started painting in watercolour. I knew instantly that I had to share them with you to inspire you to not give up! I’ve included some of them here for you. They were painted in 2011- 2012.

I first started painting in watercolour (officially) in 2011. I was painting in acrylic paint prior to taking up watercolour so it was a strange new medium for me. Using it was totally different to using acrylic paint. I had to learn to work from light to dark (the opposite of the way I was painting in acrylic) and I quickly discovered that I couldn’t cover any mistakes with more paint. It was a very strange medium to use. 

I tried to paint in watercolour before 2011 and I quickly gave up. I was hopeless. Using it was way beyond what I was capable of but the desire to use it never went away and I decided to get my watercolour paints out a second time.

I bought myself some A5 size (8.27 x 5.83 inches) Arches watercolour pads and I started painting again. I painted lots of birds and animals. I went through dozens of pads until I painted something I really liked. It was a little robin and it was the first watercolour painting that I did that I was happy with. I painted some more failures and then success again - a Willy Wagtail I was happy with and then a little wren that I thought was lovely. They are pictured  together in the first photo.

As my confidence grew I bought some A4 size pads (11.7” by 8.3”) and I started painting a little larger. Then I learned how to stretch paper and I started buying the A3 size pads (11.7” by 16.5”).

I’ve been painting full time now since May 2014 and I feel my work didn’t start improving dramatically until half way through 2015. So it took me a full 12 months of painting every day until I could see that I was getting better. Now I look at my paintings from 12 months ago and I can see an improvement from then. In order to improve, my advice is and always will be to paint as much as you can. You have to put that brush mileage in. You have to spend hours and hours and hours with a brush in your hand pushing that paint around the paper.

I’m still growing and I will continue to keep learning. I like to push myself out of my comfort zone and try different things. That’s why I want to start painting portraits. I don’t expect to ever master watercolour but I will certainly give it a good shot and I will have so much fun trying. So keep those early paintings safe and look at them again in 12 months and marvel at how much you have grown. 

💕