If you've read my posts over the last couple of months you will know I've been practising watercolour painting with a Hake brush. I started off using a 1.5" inch brush on 11 x 9 inch paper and was baffled by it! My reaction was to buy a smaller brush and to use bigger paper. I acquired the 1.25 inch and 1 inch Hake brushes and some 14 x 11 inch paper.
I roughly manage to paint skies, trees and fields with the hake and I very slowly seeing its potential. I felt it would be a good exercise to do a still life of something that looks to have fine detail (i.e. the thin leaves on the Spider plant in the image below) and attack this with the Hake brush.
Ron Ranson is, of course, an advocate of the Hake brush and insists that it prevents fiddling and fine detail which it does for the most part, but there's always the temptation to try!
Here's the original image:
The first version of this painting was a pure exercise in using the brush - I had no intention of 'doing a painting' and it was a great feeling! The idea was to simply make an impression of the spider plant with the hake brush.
I love this first version, it means freedom to me. It's a fascinating thing to me that we can do this - to "Not paint a pitcture" -- to just paint because you want to put the brush to the paper, try it and see the results and to not be bothered if it ends up as a finished painting or not :-)
After that brief practise I set about doing an actual painting of the scene. This version was okay but not really happy with the background. When I got to painting the purple part of the plant on the left, I chickened out of using the hake and used a round brush...
I enjoyed doing this version and was happy with the result. I then set about on the final version using No.6 round for the plants and a No. 10 for the background and table. Really like this painting. I'm really happy with the colours and the sense of light and I love the background! :-)
Thanks for reading... see you next time.
Ian.
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