Hello everyone, well, this is what I've created. Personally, I just preferred a portrait frame to a landscape one. The important thing is participation, and this is my first contribution to this group. I hope there will be comments and feedback, because we learn from our mistakes. Thank you, Julie Ford. And it's not necessarily something everyone will like.

Hello! I'm new here and new to watercolor, too. I just started learning about a year ago. I tried some loose sketchy courses, but found that I like paintings that look a bit more realistic. I've been painting daily, learning from tutorials and videos. My watercolor win for this week was a poppy! I've been practicing poppies all week. I'm happy to be here, getting to know you all, and learning from Julie. 🙂

I hope yu can join me this week. Find the colours and line drawing here. I recommend you draw it out first and mask out the boats and their reflections and the posts. Give yourself enough time for it to dry fully before we start. I also have a white gel pen and white gouache on hand. See you Wednesday! Any questions just ask

This was my A5 practice run. What I learnt: 1. It’s hard to paint around the boats and posts. I painted over part of mine but resolved it with gouache later. So, masking out is a good option 2. 2. I would slightly change the composition so that the posts are not right on the edge or in the middle 3. 2. Pre mix colours to keep them clean, particularly the blues and the bright areas of green and yellow which I lost a bit

Last night I did a little study of the painting for this evening's live. It helps me to work out what might be a challenge e.g. not making a green sky with blue and yellow. One of the challenges was getting the sky and water foreground dark enough. This is when using artist grade paint can make all the difference because you get so much more pigment as soon as the paint is wet. I used a set of W&N Cotman pans and it takes a lot of work to get the pigment up so it slows down the painting time and means you have to keep going in for more colour. TOP TIP. Keep student grade paints for sketchbooks. So that I can make this group useful and relevant what do you find the biggest challenges with watercolour?