General Scribbles

Practice wet on wet, very much, I need
 

Real paint!
Looks good, I like the transitions from warm to cool colours. I think you just need to let the paint/paper dry before adding the stem. The fine detail there seems to have bled too much into the little shadow area.

Yeah I've never had the patience to wait until the paint is dry. But on the other hand the wet paper always seem to be a bit too dry for the colours to blend and merge into each other smoothly (or it buckles and makes all the colour pool in limited areas...)

 Watercolour 

Watercolour!

Charlotte wrote:

or it buckles and makes all the colour pool in limited areas

Heavier paper!
Or you could try stretching it but if you don't like waiting for things to dry then that's probably not gonna be fun.

I've only ever tried stretching paper once.
I didn't like it and it didn't work.

I had it taped to a board but not properly stretched. On the other hand it came from one of those glued on all sides pads, so I didn't really need to take the paper out and tape it up in the first place. Just wanted to test it since I've always had those glued things. But I do have some with better paper than that particular one.

More watercolour. I think it's even worse than the first... the darker I tried to get the shadow, the paler it became...
 

Charlotte wrote:

the darker I tried to get the shadow, the paler it became...

 

I hate it when that happens.
You add water and it goes too transparent, so you try to keep the paint thick and then it doesn't flow off the brush.

​​​​​Are you using a set of dry pans of colour or tubes of paint?
I find tubes are a bit better for this problem as you can just use the wet paint squeezed straight from the tube and it remains fairly dark and opaque.

Dry pans - I can't find my tubes. I know I have them somewhere because I got them for my birthday. 10 years or so ago...

Our teacher taught us to spray the dry pans with water a while before starting the painting so they have time to soften up a bit, though. (Not that I actually did that today - that would require me to find my spray bottle. Which I know I have somewhere because I have a vague memory of seeing it.... somewhere... but not exactly where... )