The practice of water-colour painting . hes of water, so as to avoid the riskof his touches drying with unduly hard edges. The darker passages in his picture he lays in,as far as possible, with a single wash. He doesnot superimpose wash upon wash until thenecessary depth of colour is attained ; he begins adark mass, instead, at its lightest part, and takingmore colour in his brush from time to time as hegoes on, he expresses the gradation and modellingin this mass by floating the light and the dark intogether. In this way he gains a pleasant qualityof surface, and an agreeable blending of both
The practice of water-colour painting . hes of water, so as to avoid the riskof his touches drying with unduly hard edges. The darker passages in his picture he lays in,as far as possible, with a single wash. He doesnot superimpose wash upon wash until thenecessary depth of colour is attained ; he begins adark mass, instead, at its lightest part, and takingmore colour in his brush from time to time as hegoes on, he expresses the gradation and modellingin this mass by floating the light and the dark intogether. In this way he gains a pleasant qualityof surface, and an agreeable blending of bothcolours and tones which is specially expressive ;and he also keeps his colour from that tendencytowards opacity which is apt to appear when thedark passages in a water-colour are brought up totheir full pitch by successive washes. Naturally,working in this way, he is careful not to allow hiscolour to become too sloppy ; if he did, the grada-tions in the wash would run together, and the modellings at which he was aiming would not be 106. X ?x- MR. ALFRED POWELL distinguishable. He keeps his pigments in a creamy consistency, moist enough to enable them to be laid easily on the paper, but not so wet that a touch will spread appreciably beyond the place that it is intended to occupy. What exactly should be the amount of water used in this mode of handling water-colours the painter can only find out by experiment. Mr. Powell has developed the method into a certainty, and much of the charm of texture which can be perceived in his paintings comes from the skill with which he brings his pigments to the right consistency and avoids that excessive fluidity of touch which is so difficult to control. Yet he equally avoids dryness, and the hard definition of washes which is undesirable in finished work and not always acceptable even in a slight sketch. The colours he uses are lemon yellow, gamboge, aureolin, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, raw umber, Vandyke brown, sepi
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectwatercolorpainting
