Category Archives: mountains in watercolor

DAVID BELLAMY GLAZING A WATERCOLOUR FOR ATMOSPHERE

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The glazing technique is an extremely powerful way of creating atmosphere in your landscapes, and is a method I use regularly. This involves laying a transparent or semi-transparent wash of watercolour over part of a painting that has already been painted. You need to ensure that the paper is completely dry before laying on the glaze, although if you are very experienced you can on occasion get away with laying it on a damp surface, although it is easy to end up with a mess in that case!

This is a watercolour sketch of a scene high up in the Sundance Mountains in the Canadian Rockies, painted in a cartridge A4 sketch-book, and is almost a monochrome. Throughout I’ve used a mixture of French ultramarine and cadmium red in various strengths of tone, firstly laying on a wash of a light version and when this had dried applying detail with a darker tone of the same mix to indicate the shadow areas on the peaks. When all the background detail had been painted I waited till it dried and then applied a glaze of the same mixture only making this darker above the large boulders and lightening it as it crept up the face of the far mountain. This softened some of the lower detail and created a sense of misty atmosphere in the valley below. I then completed the foreground detail on rocks and trees. This scene is featured in my Watercolour and Beyond book published by Search Press. It is packed with watercolour techniques and methods to enhance your paintings.

The glaze method can be used on all types of landscape, not just mountain scenery, and limiting the colours in this way further enhances the mood. With sharp contrasts in the foreground the sense of misty atmosphere is further enhanced. The technique is also great for warming up or cooling down a passage in your composition, or if you wish to highlight a particular part of it, such as a building, summit or other feature.

One extremely effective tip is to try this method out on an old watercolour, perhaps one that hasn’t really worked for you, so dig out some of you old painting and have some wonderfully experimental moments with them.

DAVID BELLAMY Painting Rock Features

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Rock and cliff features are some of my favourites, not just in the mountains, but when painting coastal scenes. You can obtain truly striking effects of light on rocks and crags in the contrasts of light and shadows areas, and also colours are intensified wet rocks are caught in certain light or when they become wet, allowing you to introduce imaginative and creative responses.

In this composition high up on the Sundance Mountains of the Canadian Rockies I turned afternoon light into early evening by flooding the peaks with a transparent glaze of French Ultramarine and Alizarin Crimson, and deepening the shadows. Much of the rock surfaces I have left completely blank to increase the suggestion of strong light, while the shadow parts were painted with a weak mixture of French Ultramarine and cadmium red, then yellow ochre was floated in while it was still wet. When this had dried I drew in some fracture lines with a no. 1 rigger using French Ultramarine and burnt umber, applying more pressure to the brush in places to vary the width of the fractures.

For the flattish foreground I glued tissue paper over the Saunders Waterford 200lb rough paper, which of course changes the response of a wash considerably. Tissue paper is quite useful for depicting rocks as it creates natural fractures when glued down, if you leave the crinkle ridges in place. I painted over it using the side of a large sable to further suggest textures, and for this I apply a very wet wash then follow it up by dropping other colour into it to cteate variations. This is one of the techniques from my book Watercolour and Beyond, which contains many techniques and devices I’ve not covered before.

I shall be carrying out a demonstration and workshop at https://internationalwatercolourmasters.com/events-new/david-bellamy-19-may-1-day-workshop/ the International Watercolour Masters event in Shropshire on 18th and 19th May and would love to see you there if you can make it.

DAVID BELLAMY: HAPPY CHRISTMAS

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It feels very un-Christmassy here in rain-drenched Pembrokeshire at the moment while I’m recovering from a fairly mild dose of ‘flu, and I’ll need to be in top form next week when my two over-active grand-daughters arrive. Jenny will be safely ensconced in Hampshire with her ‘little’ ones while I face the full force of furious chaos.

A fall of snow would help of course, with the distraction of building a snowman while I sneak in a quick watercolour sketch if I’m lucky. Plotting it is fairly easy as I can take the girls up handy toboggan slopes at the same time and where the mountains are in full view. The attached watercolour of the Black Mountains gives an idea of what can be done reasonably quickly. In cases like this where speed is vital then watercolour pencils are truly effective.

Note how the track on the right-hand side has been defined in the snow with intermittent stabs of the brush to suggest a winding effect. For this I used transparent red oxide, and also floated it into the dark mass under the trees while this was still wet. The background at this point has been kept simple with just a stroke or two of a wash brush, and the mountain ridge at the top has been lost in cloud in places. These are all really simple techniques which use the watercolour medium to advantage. This has been painted in the studio on Saunders Waterford 140lb NOT paper, but in a sketch these effects can be achieved in two or three minutes with watercolour pencils, working freely without any need to create a complete landscape composition.

Enjoy your Christmas and have a great time. I wish you every happiness for Christmas and 2026 and evry success with your painting.

DAVID BELLAMY: PAINTING ICESCAPES

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After five days of gloomy weather in the mountains of Snowdonia last month I decided I just had to go for the subject that was my prime target this time, whatever the last day threw at me. I aimed to climb up Cwm Tryfan to a spot where I could sketch Bristly Ridge, and hope the view was clear when I arrived. The light started well, but deteriorated to the murky mich-mash it had been all week. Plastered in thick ice, the east face of Tryfan gave me hope that my target scene would be likewise, but just being on the mountain gave me such joy, and fired me to do several sketches on the way up.

When Bristly Ridge eventually hove into view it took my breath away. Although I was familiar with the face and had climbed it in ice-rimed conditions, it presents an awesome spectacle, especially after many days of icy easterly blasts. I moved to a position where an attractive cascade and brook offered a superb lead-in and then sat on a friendly nearby rock to sketch in an A4 book. Unfortunately my position was rather exposed to that useful but hostile easterly that still blasted away, but initially the effort of getting up there kept me warm.

The poor light made observation of much of the rock architecture almost impossible to make out, but the ridge outline stood out well, as did the main gullies. I began with a grey pen, quickly drawing in the main features, well aware that I needed to work fast. As the temperature hovered around the freezing point the washes of French ultramarine with a touch of lunar black worked well without freezing up. I inserted the more prominent features first, working right across the composition, then applying a more impressionist style to suggest the lesser important crags and gullies.

A cuppa revivied me but the cold really began to penetrate so I dotted in a couple of climbers some two-thirds of the way up the left-hand slope but could not see the third one at the time. Then I hurriedly included the cascade and rocks, though did not have enough paper left to do a proper job. This is just a basic rendering of the scene, but in a painting I would bring it to life with creative lighting, and not include quite so much detail, losing some with cloud or shadow.

This was something of a nostalgic return as I have had many wild adventures here, some of them extremely life-threatening, a fact that intensifies my love for this magical spot, one of the most impressive in the British mountains.

David Bellamy – On-line watercolour workshop of a Mountain Painting

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I write this as a follow-up to my online workshop this afternoon on Shopkeeparty, which was a simple 45-minute demonstration in watercolour of the Middim Khola River in the Nepal Himalaya where I led a trek and paint group in 2000. The aim was to demonstrate how to achieve a sense of space and distance, create a tranquil mood in dramatic backlighting, dropping in spot colour and illustrating several brush techniques.

This shows the finished painting: I added a little extra sparkle by scratching with a scalpel below the trees and finally painted in a few dark blobs in the foreground to suggest larger stones in the river, but otherwise it is basically as completed during the workshop. If you took part I hope you enjoyed the experience and if you missed it you can still find it on Youtube. 

Next Tuesday, 11th August I will be running a watercolour Masterclass again with Shopkeeparty, and this will last around 2.5 to 3 hours. The subject will be Blencathra mountain in the Lake District with Thirlmere in the foreground, and of course with much more time I will be covering so much more, showing mountain structure, atmosphere, reflections in still water, massed and individual trees, crags, how to introduce more colour naturally, brushwork, negative painting and much more. I will be using my favourite, Saunders Waterford paper. Details are available at    https://shopkeepeasy.com/davidbellamy   You will be able to ask questions throughout and we will move at a pace that will ensure you can keep up with the painting being demonstrated. The Masterclass painting will bring in more colour than the above scene which was aimed at creating a strong moody backlit subject.

In the meantime, enjoy your painting!