Drawing lessons - 2 - painting

After a week I had the next part of the course. Unfortunately the weather turned bad.
Because of the wind and rain I couldn't  finish the sketch from Drawing lessons - 1.
Maybe next time.

To our surprise we had to use watercolour paint - a gouache. We was told to find some view behind the window, frame it and sketch it without using the pencil, only the brush, from the beginning.

This is what I came with after 3 hours.It is not a finished piece of art, but I'll leave it like that.

Image below is a digitally altered version I've created, to see if using a less thinned paint would fix that dull look. And the answer is yes. 

I added only a bit of contrast and NO saturation. The reason it looks so flat is that through the whole week I studied a watercolor (aquarell is a transparent paint) techniques by myself and somehow it switched in my mind to work the same way with gouache.

Below is the view I have had choosen for my painting. I hate to draw trees, flowers etc. so it was a real pain to face this subject.



As I said, we had to make the sketch using the brush and then paint it until finished, a technique called alla prima.
Smudges around trees are in fact a places reserved for trunks. Three hours wasn't enough to finish this artwork using my technique. Anyways I'm gonna do it better next time I hope.

This is our beautiful environment, full of original sculptures from the Wilanow Park.

The master painter (sits in the distance, reading a book) is checking our progress from time to time and gives us some hints.

This is an amazing phenomenon as eight people in the same place create a completely different picture. Obviously they used a lot more  paint then I did. My painting is the third one.

What I've learned is:

- A grass is something I can deal with, but painting trees still "makes me sick"
- I can paint an A3 size / 16.5 x 11.7 in (milestone), without the first pencil sketch and it doesn't feel like 3 hours, rather than one hour (amazing!)
- I need more self confidence while using a paint to add more contrast, because shading gradient is pretty ok
- A gouache is an opaque watercolor paint (I use reeves 18 color tubescurrently), so there is no need to be so careful about the white and bright areas, like it is while painting the aquarell watercolor. But it can be used like that.
- I have to improve putting the first background layers to get more atmosphere and avoid that bright smudges around first plane objects.

So these are my hints for the future.

Update

I forgot to mention, that few days later I've made a "copy" of this painting, trying to fix all mentioned issues.
Here is a framed, A5 size (8.3 x 5.8 in) gouache painting.

It's smaller because I wanted to save the time, paint and the paper. Well... it didn't work, I had to use a smaller brush to get the details right :>,  so the overall time shrinked only by a half, not by 4.
On a first copy I used number 8 and here no. 4 and 8. It is something to think about next time.

Still not perfect and balance between dark and bright areas could be better.
This time instead of Koh-I-Noor 300g/m2 watercolor paper, I took a Canson 250g/m2, 10 sheets per block.  (I suppose 300g is around 140lb).

This type of Canson paper has a regular dotted texture, which looks like a fabric. I prefer that Koh-I-Noor rough texture which is more irregular, so it doesn't look like a grid.

I hope you like my work :)