Watercolour Painting | Reflections of Mountains

Here’s another one of the exercises that I tried from Adelene Fletcher’s 2003 publication The Watercolour Landscape Painter’s Pocket Palette. This particular exercise is on page 44, under the Inland Water section, and just like the other exercises in the book, is broken down into three stages.

What’s taught

The first stage takes you through using masking fluid for the snow capped mountains, and laying down several very pale washes that you must leave to dry. Stage two has you working with masking tape, and concentrates on building up the tonal values for the land and tree-line. Finally, in stage three you learn how to paint the reflection in the water, how to create ripples by lifting-out with a damp brush, as well as some scratching out when the painting has dried.

This exercise used a limited palette of 4 colours

All in all, taking into account the amount of drying time that’s required as you work through the various stages of the exercise, it took me about one and a half hours to complete.

What I learned

I didn’t seem to run into any major difficulties at all, apart from leaving it a little too long before I scratched out the  tree trunks. I ended up pressing the paper too hard and bruising the paper instead, but that’s part of my journey!