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You might be astounded to learn how many artists HATE working in watercolor. It's interesting because there are so many reasons why it's the best medium to use.: it's cheaper, cleaning your brushes is a BREEZE, and if you make a mess of a painting you can sometimes save it by cropping the ugly out of it with a pair of scissors. And so on. And that brush cleaning thing is worth about 1,000 cool points just by itself.

The reason so many artists hate it is simple.: watercolor does not do what you want it to do. In some respects, this is okay, one color bleeding into another creates magic more often than not. But what happens is that when it dries it becomes shades lighter than when you started. To say this is frustrating heinously belittles the concept of understatement.

Worse, all the lovely nuances that make a painting worthy of the finest galleries becomes one bland same shade of blah when the water evaporates. So you try to fix it with another wee bit-o-paint. Sometimes gallery worthiness is recovered. More likely though you get the dreaded "looks like chalk" that tells you it's time to abandon ship. Watercolor is truly the painting medium for masochists.

The image accompanying this blog post is my second effort to capture the Icelandic waterfall Gulfoss from the vantage point where millions of gallons of water a second seem to simply get swallowed by the earth. My goal was to use the fewest possible brush strokes, a goal I failed utterly to achieve. What looked lovely and gallery worthy when the paint was first applied looked the same shade of blah when the paint dried. So I tried to fix it with another wee bit-o-paint, and...it did not do what I wanted it to do.

Sigh.

Here is my first effort to paint Gulfoss from this vantage point.

I felt that this became way too chalky, and the land in the foreground is overwhelming compositionally, but in some ways it worked out better than the second attempt, the one that you had to click on in order to get in to read this.

For comparison, this third one was done in about 37 seconds. No kidding. This is the child's fingerpainting version.

In none of these did I achieve the shimmer and glow of a truly well done watercolor.

But, stay tuned.

I haven't given up.