A New Medium

This week marks my first foray into watercolors.  A few lessons:

1) Painting is way harder than pencil-sketching
2) watercolors BLEED.  When I put my pencil down, it marks exactly where I place it.  With these paints, the mark runs everywhere.  It's tough.

Like most new attempts, the first one is pretty poor:

The colors don't blend well, the shape is malformed, and the structure is way uncomfortable.  However, it was a good learning experience, getting my hand used to having a brush instead of a pencil.

The second shot was marginally better.  Here's a monochrome mountain scape I ripped off from some tutorial video on youtube:

Better.  The blending is better, and the different objects have slightly different textures.  The water in the foreground looks somewhat watery, and the sky falls away better than I expected.  Still, the brush strokes seem clumsy.  Hopefully my next shot at stuff like this will continue to improve.  :)