Dipping into Watercolour Sketching

Above: Tadley Common, with and without cattle. Both ~ 20 minute lunchtime sketches.
Below: 15 minute sketch of fields near Kingsclere.

Watercolour is a dashed tricky medium.
It's quick, cheap, and easy to clean up after; it also doesn't require a lot of paraphernalia. But once you've applied the paint to the paper, it pretty much stays there - there's no going back without either making a mess or "cheating" (i.e. applying white acrylic).

But I like a challenge.

And I've decided to take the "quick" bit seriously.

The sketches shown above are in order of execution. The first Tadley Common one was possibly a bit overenthusiastic. The second one has more tonal range. It's just a pity that the splendid black Dexter (a bovine beast; I hesitate to say "cow", because it looked more like a bullock) was chased away by someone's muzzled brindle greyhound. I had only just arrived, and was wedging my bike against a tree at the time, so it didn't affect me directly - but it wasn't right.

The last sketch was very quick, and only used half of the colours in my tiny sketcher's watercolour set. I think it's the better for both of these things.