I recently saw an ad online for a watercolor class to paint a beautiful sunset mountain scene. I love the painting done by the artist. But there’s a lot going on in my life right now, and committing myself to a course, even an online one, just isn’t in the cards right now.

So I decided to try to paint it myself, with little bits of time carved out here and there. I could probably figure it out–I’ve done a fair bit of watercolor painting.

It didn’t go well. First of all, I had to admit that I don’t, at this point, have the skillset in watercolors to tackle this painting–the sunbeams, the mist on the water, it’s tricky. Another reason it didn’t go well is that I used the wrong paper–mixed media paper instead of proper watercolor paper. As I tried to lift of color and add washes, the paper began to break down and start falling apart, little bits of it sticking to my brush–you can see the damaged paper in the image below.

Pretty awful, right? So bad that it was hard for me to post it here.

But I decided to try it again a couple of days ago, this time using a medium I’ve only just started using–gouache paint. It’s a lot like watercolor, but it’s opaque rather than translucent. This means that you can add light over dark paints, something you can’t do with watercolor.

Like with the watercolor version, I struggled with the gouache version at first. But as I continued to work at it, I gradually stopped looking at the reference photo and instead got into the zone, focused on my own painting in progress, blending colors and trying to create enough tonal contrast between the lights and the darks.

Here’s the gouache version:

I feel better about this one.

It’s an imperfect experiment, however. Did trying this scene again help to advance my art skills? You know, practice makes perfect (or better, anyway). Or is it that I’m more comfortable with and so maybe better at gouache painting?

There’s no clear takeaway here. Try, try again or keep searching for the medium that suits you the best?

Maybe it’s a bit of both.