Philip Hatter

We have a very special blog post today by student Philip Hatter. Tutor Steven Hersey has been delighted with Philip’s progress on the course and wanted us to share his penultimate set of work. Philip is studying our Watercolour Painting Course. We are not only thrilled to be able to share the artwork but also the text Philip wrote to go along side his submission. He explains how he created his paintings which we hope allows students to follow along and understand his process a little. We hope that you find Philip’s artwork as inspirational as we do! Congratulations on an amazing set of artwork!

For this assignment I wanted to explore the benefits of using masking fluid to create magical sparkling light such as is shown in the final reference photo on the Study unit.

On a bright sunny day when you walk into a dark wooded area I love the way the light beams through the trees and I wanted this to be the focus so I reduced the scene down to two trees on the left. One tree leans slightly to the left the other slightly to the right and the tree on the right is slightly thicker for dominance.

I established where the light areas were going to be and used masking fluid in these areas and I spattered masking fluid a bit, And a couple of very thin lines of masking fluid. When using the masking fluid I was still focusing on the flow of the painting and keeping it loose, easy to get carried away with the
splattering also.

I painted the lights and the foreground Cadmium Yellow/orange Sap green burnt sienna light red, and then whilst still wet went in with the dark green, burnt umber, winsor blue (my favourite) in the middle of the painting I added a neutral grey cool at the top and warm at the bottom.

When it was drying I lifted out slightly over the trees and added a bit of warmth to there colour. With a smaller synthetic brush I added darker passages into the darks to create more texture and variation.
When fully dry before removing the masking fluid using a small synthetic brush I scrubbed out around the masked areas but with thin cadmium yellow not clear water so it glazed to give a glow.

Then after removing the masking fluid I painted in the leaves softening some edges (or at least tried) and left some areas white. That was the first painting I enjoyed it so much I tried another one and added
some logs on the bottom right and I think the second painting I got more of the sparkly effects.

Just out of interest I found a photo online of Abbey Park in Leicester with some nice light so I tried the technique on that and have include it.

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