Along with my watercolor discord, I decided to redo Kolbie Blume’s 10-Day Painting the Wilderness challenge from 2021, the same challenge that I found super valuable in helping me get into watercolor in the first place 3 years ago!
It’s fun to read back to my original post and see how much this challenge meant to me the first time. Doing it again reminded me of that excitement – the anticipation and joy of listening to those first strains of the video theme song and the ritual of taping my paper down each time. I followed the tutorial less this time than I did originally, opting more to do my own thing.
The Paintings
Day 1 – Galaxy Night Sky
Colors: Phthalo Blue GS, Phthalo Blue RS, Indanthrone Blue, Payne’s Gray, white gouache, black gouache
Loved:
- I really love the way this one turned out! I kept adding layers of blue until I had the depth that I wanted.
- I paid attention to the galaxy shape from the reference to try to keep it looking like more like a Milky Way and not general distributed lightness.
- I placed an object on the paper to represent the vanishing point and made all the trunks point to that in order to create the perspective to make it feel you’re looking up.
Learned:
- I was worried this one would be “overworked” with too many layers and shades of blue, but I actually really like it. It’s ok to break the rules sometimes!
- The temptation will be to make the galaxy a symmetric butterfly, but it looks more natural if the sides contain different shapes, sizes, and levels of brightness.
- Test splatter ahead to make sure you get the right consistency; paint that was too thick gave me some lines rather than dots that I didn’t intend.
Day 2 – Layered Mountains
Colors: Yellow Ochre, Prussian Blue, Perylene Red (for graying down)
Loved:
- Subtle yellow ochre sky. I don’t usually use Yellow Ochre but I like it here.
- The very back layer has enough lightness, which is challenging to do.
Learned:
- Water control is truly the main issue with layered mountains. I didn’t refer to my “learned” from the first time, where I actually did it better! I hesitated to use a big brush because I didn’t want to dilute the paint too much in the top layers, but I ended up with a lot of unwanted sharp edges due to the “outline” drying too fast. Per Kolbie’s advice it would have helped to use a much larger brush, and also mix up more paint first so I wasn’t hurriedly remixing while the paint dried.
- Uncharacteristically, I think I was afraid to use too much color! More turquoise and less gray in the hills would have been more fun.
Day 3 – Misty Forest
Colors: Cobalt Turquoise, Quinacridone Coral, MANS, Indanthrone Blue, Viridian
Loved:
- I kind of like how oddly chromatic this is as it could have been monochrome. The reddish middle layer is interesting as well as the shades of green in the trees.
- There is some interesting color separation with the use of Cobalt Turquoise.
Learned:
- Preplanning would have helped here. The (seemingly) spontaneous way that Kolbie paints in tutorials suits my inclinations very well, but I think it’s paintings like this that remind me of the value of undersketching to make sure that I am being intentional about the relative sizes of each layer, as it’s very easy to get into the “zone” of painting a million tiny trees that are the same size.
- Preplanning my colors would also have helped with depth (e.g. going redder to greener systematically instead of at random).
- Using more pigmented paint for the trees could have helped me to use more economical brush strokes – I think it looks messy that I went over almost all of them multiple times.
Day 4 – Misty Meadow
Colors: Rich Green Gold, Indanthrone Blue, Cobalt Blue, Quin Rose, MANS, white gouache
Loved:
- Darkness of the shadowy grass
- Loose florals, including white flowers in shadow
- Sky gradient
Learned:
- With preplanning, could have reserved white for the mist; it still looks pink because I’d done the sky first and put the mist where there was already sky.
- In a misty scene, the distant horizon could be lighter.
- One of my friends did this in a way where the mist had these neat tendrils. That would be nicer than a flat across line.
Day 5 – Waterfall
Colors: Indanthrone Blue, MANS, TRO, Perylene Red (just a hint to bring out more red from TRO)
Loved:
- I brought out the color changes in the rocks more than the reference.
- Subtle green of the water.
- Reserved white and didn’t use gouache.
Learned:
- Find a way to sketch in the places where I want to reserve whites, especially when there is a soft edge involved. I did undersketch, but I was hesitant to put in a line around the waterfall splash because it might show up. But then I kept forgetting where I wanted to leave the white and painting into the area, so as a result, the watercolor splash is in the wrong place.
- Maybe I could learn a lesson about having more patience with putting in the rock crags? I remember really liking this one the first time around but finding it tiresome this time. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for something intricate.
- Turn up monitor brightness to see what’s going on in the dark areas of the painting.
Day 6 – Moon
Colors: Indigo, Naples Yellow Deep, Quin Red (PV19), white gouache
Loved:
- The relative simplicity of this one!
- Limited palette. I ordinarily would go nuts trying to make the horizon orange as vibrant as possible, but I intentionally went against my instincts and allowed it to be kind of a dull coral mix of quin rose and NYD, and I like the results.
- White gouache is easy and effective for the moon (with palette gray sea shadows)
- Leaving white paper and drybrushing over it is easy and effective for the sea sparkle
- Good save of an unwanted drying edge by putting a soft cloud over it
Learned:
- I ended up making less of the sky blue than I intended; I don’t mind it, but it might be useful to mark the margins with where I expect different parts of the gradient to end.
- Using a stencil, masking cutout, etc. might have helped to make the moon more round.
Day 7 – Wildflowers
This is not the reference from day 7. Day 7 is the day I’d been dreading because I didn’t enjoy it the first time and because it requires masking fluid, which I don’t have. (I used intricately cut masking tape the first time, but I didn’t have patience for that this time.) Instead of following the reference, I decided to replace it with a different but similar subject: hot-pink sweetpea blossoms I had photographed recently and wanted to paint for their bold color.
Colors: Opera Rose, Transparent Orange, Rich Green Gold, Indanthrone Blue, MANS, Transparent Red Oxide, Cobalt Blue
Loved:
- Choosing my own subject that is meaningful to me!
- Opera color pop
Learned:
- Painting around is not an effective way to paint a soft background with a crisp foreground, and I have to admit masking would have been more apt.
- Using the portrait mode on my original reference photo might have helped me conceptualized how to soften the background. As it was, I struggled to paint a “soft” version of the background of my reference photo, which was in focus and too busy.
Day 8 – Sunlit Forest
Colors: Prussian Blue, Quin Gold, Indian Red
Note the time gap between days 7 and 8 – I took two weeks off of painting to move house and this was the first one I did after I got my paints back out. This is one where I followed the tutorial more than the reference in an effort to simplify. Ultimately, I prefer my “first time around” version, but I feel proud of myself for picking up a brush!
Loved:
- I actually used a limited palette (this is one of the first things I did after reading Hazel Soan’s The Art of the Limited Palette). Self-discipline! I wasn’t sure how it would work but I was pleasantly surprised by the range of colors I was able to make. In particular Indian Red + Prussian Blue makes a nice gray-brown which turns redder in a thirsty brush, which gives a nice sunlit effect.
- I did not use gouache. The thirsty brush rays have their ups and downs but I feel like gouache would have made a mess so I feel satisfied with my decision to stay away.
Learned:
- Sun rays don’t actually go like that; I had trouble deciding which parts to leave as rays and remembering to thirsty-brush them in time on successive layers, so they got kind of misplaced. An undersketch would have helped.
- The light background trunks should not have bisected brighter/closer-seeming leaves.
- I made an attempt on upper layers to leave gaps for the sunlight because the thirsty brush wasn’t cutting it with more paint, but this ended up making the trunks wavy. Again perhaps an undersketch would have helped define the trunk shapes so I wasn’t guessing what location to put them as they weren’t continuous.
Day 9 – River Valley
Colors: Rich Green Gold (PY129), Indanthrone Blue (PB60), Transparent Red Oxide (PR101)
Loved:
- Overall I think this gives the right mysterious effect!
- Limited triad comes through again! The palette feels harmonious.
- Atmospheric perspective effect with very pale back mountain
- The glowy brightness of the green mountain; it is much more vibrant than the photo, but I like that. Because I didn’t go too hard with the vibrance in the rest of the image, it jumps off the page.
Learned:
- I think I overworked the shadows without really creating the 3 dimensionality that I wanted, especially on the brightest mountain. I can now see I should have made the shadows more slanted.
- There’s some awkward overlap in color between the two right-side mountains – perhaps could have been avoided with more undersketching or perhaps if I’d just committed to glazing the back mountain when it got some yellow-green on it. Though I also like the hazy, not-too-yellow color.
Day 10 – Aurora
Colors: Indanthrone Blue, Transparent Red Oxide, Viridian, Lemon Yellow
Loved:
- I didn’t make the green too yellow! This was something I struggled with in my swatch tests. Adding more yellow is a natural way to make the green lighter and more saturated, and I found it difficult to get the right balance when mixing a green, even with Cobalt Turquoise. Starting with Viridian and using mostly dilution to make the color lighter – with just a very light touch of yellow – helped me to keep the color cooler.
- Aurora colors are blended more effectively than I have done them in the past. I’ve often done auroras by painting the dark blue of the sky as tendrils into the aurora, but that often makes it look too harsh and streaky. (Like the left side of the painting, but across the board.) This time, I used more mixes – mixing Viridian into the Indanthrone of the sky – to keep a more gentle gradient look.
- Higher contrast in the reflection with darker, less saturated blues along the edges and lighter whites in the middle.
- I did the mountains first, and then painting the aurora around them. While more challenging, I like this better than the tutorial method I did last time, where the background is painting first, then the mountains black, then white snow is drybrushed onto the mountains.
Learned:
- I struggled a lot with the reflections and I think ultimately they are too busy. I used too small of a brush or something.
- More planning of the lights could have gone a long way toward making the reflections of the mountains match better. Or maybe a better way would have been integrating painting the reflection more with painting the mountains (layer or section by section), instead of doing all the mountains first then all the reflections. Or maybe turning the page would have helped rather than trying to paint them upside down.
Conclusion
Redoing this challenge was a mix of fun and frustrating. I think starting strong in some ways restricted me and made me too failure-averse later on. In days 2-6, in particular, I had more frustrations than I had the first time I did this challenge, perhaps because I expect more of myself now than I did as a true beginner. This is the opposite of the intended effect of Kolbie’s teachings!
I noticed this trend and decided to do something different with day 7, take the challenge less literally and using a different reference photo. Then, after a 2-week break, I felt so rusty on day 8 that I was more willing to roll with the imperfections. That allowed me to hit a stride on day 9.
Since I did this challenge in a period of time where I was having a bit of personal turmoil (moving house and whatnot), it was good to have some structure and someone telling me what to paint as I was having trouble coming up with my own inspiration. I didn’t always follow the tutorials, but it was great to follow a structured challenge where I didn’t have to make my own decisions.