Is anyone else overwhelmed with the amount of tutorials available on YouTube? I know I am.

First published March 17, 2024: This week I wanted to work on my loose watercolor painting, so I searched YouTube for loose watercolor painting tutorials. Some were not of subjects I was interested in painting. I like to use my own subject, so I found Tom Shepherd’s  “Loose Watercolour Painting Tutorial Beginner”. (Yes, I know I am not a beginner, but I still struggle, so I assume I am missing something basic — thus, “beginner.”) According to his website, Tom offers in-person, Zoom and YouTube classes and tutorials. The one I watched on YouTube was free, and very helpful. It was about 20 minutes long.

Tom brought up a term I am becoming more familiar with — “painterly.” He said the word has a definition, so I looked it up. Because of course, I want to paint “painterly.” Google found a definition supplied by the Tate Museum of Art in the UK: Painterly refers to “the application of paint in a ‘loose’ or less than controlled manner, resulting in the appearance of visible brushstrokes within the finished painting.”

Well that is not me — yet. I will have to think more about that and how I will practice being more painterly, since I definitely need to loosen up! Tom painted a very lovely bird with a dark background. He spent some time talking about his method (theory) which I found very helpful. It is very similar to what I am hearing from Angela Fehr in her Heart-led Journey class. I don’t want to steal their thunder, but I think it is well known that if we want to paint loosely we need to see shapes instead of objects. I won’t say anymore because Tom (and Angela) says it best.

I used a photo from my trip to Taiwan. While in Taipei we visited numerous beautiful parks with water features, and I came across this bird multiple times. I tried to figure out what kind it is, but I have not had any luck so far, It is definitely a water bird.

Here is my painting after watching Tom’s tutorial. He did a very action-packed painting from his subject, and I have to say that my subject was just standing at the water’s edge, so the best I could try to depict was the movement of water around him.

This will take a lot of practice to get the hang of painting loosely. Watercolors are a great challenge and very unforgiving (unlike acrylics). So paint every day!

Happy Artventures this week,
cs