Hey, this isn't about trolls under bridges, silly!! This is about Kruger National Park and how I painted a watercolour painting of the other side of the bridge.

The right side was so different from what we saw on the left side of the low wide concrete bridge we were parked on. 

So different!

When I turned by head to see what was on the other side of the bridge I was very surprised. It was so much greener. Not so open. And it was so beautiful, that I just had to take a panoramic photo of the scene. 

  

This is a stitched together scenes of more than on photo I took of it. Maybe I’ll paint it in oils as a panoramic view one of these days. 

But have a look at this:

It’s a watercolour I did in 2006. 

How I painted it:

Preparation:

        1. As to the composition, I only used part of the scene to work on. 

        2. I wet (a light spray of water) both sides of my watercolour paper. This prevents curling-up of the paper by counterbalance (equalizes) contraction presented to both sides. 

Undercoat:

        3. Then laying in a light wash of raw sienna, all over the whole the A4 page of the semi-smooth watercolour paper. 

        4. The whole intention of laying down a soft wash of raw sienna was to give the scene a happy sunny radiance. In the photo it doesn’t show how sunny the scene really was. 

         5. Using a soft undercoat, it also unifies and gathers the whole scene together. This is very important if you are going to leave some spots un-painted, as sunlit highlighted areas. 

How it was painted:

         6. Without drawing-in a previous synopsis of the scene, I started working from the top of the page, downwards. 

         7. I used quick-movement brushstrokes, not worrying if a dot of paint was in the right place or not!   

        8. Keeping in mind the position of everything, I also left out the unnecessary unimportant bits and pieces of the scene. Why? Because too much detail can make the painting look too fussy and busy. 

         9. Because it’s a very cool scene with so much green and blue, I emphasized the warmer colours, here and there. Using warm and colour colours puts more emotion into your paintings. People buy according to their emotions remember. 

10. First painted in the soft colours and then the darker colours. Some areas I had to deepen the green foliage to give the painting definition and more depth and dimension between the background and the foreground.

Definition: 

         11. Looking at the painting from a distance: You can see how the sun shines on the natural stone `steps’ and the ripples of the water in the river, where I left it mostly unpainted, except for the soft undercoat. 

                Hope you enjoy it, as much as I enjoyed painting it.