Hello, everyone. It’s been a while! After a whole month of exams and assignments, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks cleaning up my room, after it became a dungeon of paint and paper during the busy end-of-term period.

In my earlier post, I shared with you what I learnt about landscape painting from my watercolour course at ADM, taught by Asst Prof Ng Woon Lam. During the course, I learnt that apart from technical skills, it’s important to know the basics of colour theory. This allows artists to select the best matching colours, hues and tones when painting.

I’m definitely not a “pro” at this, and despite all my ADM profs going through colour theory with me over and over again, I still sometimes give them a blank face. So it’s been a real challenge for me to improve the “colour” aspect of my watercolour paintings, since I’ve worked mostly in black and white with pens and pencils, like this sketch of Jiufen that I did during my recent visit to northern Taiwan.

For someone more used to sketching, my first few watercolour paintings were an absolute disaster. You won’t see them here as I don’t wish to strain your eyes.

Instead, I present one of my early (and desperate) attempts to paint NTU Hall 2, in the vein of Asst Prof Ng’s marvellous work. As you’ll see from my attempt, I had no idea how to control the flow and technique – and my colours were totally disastrous, lacking the vibrant transitions found in good watercolour pieces.

After completing that painting, I decided to work on my colour transitions and composition for another piece – I wasn’t really happy with the end result as the colours and edges were too clearly defined, but I think it looks better than my previous attempt.

I still have plenty of practice to do but I’m quite happy with my final painting for the term – it’s a watercolour version of my earlier sketch of Jiufen in Taiwan:

I hope to post more about my watercolour heroes – John Singer Sargent, John Salminen and Masato Watanabe – and my art adventures at ADM in a future blog post. That’s all for now though, and I hope to catch you all again soon! 😀

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