This is the painting I did as a demo for my class last night.  After class as I was finishing it I made a huge mistake.  The point of the lesson was to create a more interesting and stronger centre of interest under the overhang.  I felt the darkish wash I used in class wasn’t dark enough so I put a second very dark wash on it and it became too dark, a muddy mess.  That is the one thing that is hard to correct.  I added lighter opaque colours with chinese white but it had no life.  So then it was a double mess.  Finally in desperation I scrubbed out the entire area.  This you can see in the top example.  I’ve left the original dark (with some lighter highlights) to the left of the pillar.

After this dried I then re-applied the darker washes.  This repair job will never have the freshness of that first wash but at least it saved the painting from being recycled.

Many people believe that watercolours can’t be corrected or changed and this is another example that disproves that.  Not a great ending but as they say, ‘it could have been worse’.

For those in class I also added a slightly darker wash to the lawn and the sky.  One nice touch was a light wash of cobalt teal in the top left corner.  Our goal is always to achieve what we want in that first magical wash. Often we fall short but even when we do we can learn so much.

Happy painting.