Pebble Gallery

Throughout my watercolour journey, I’ve always loved painting interesting pebbles I find on the beach. I love the colours, textures, patterns and shapes. Below is a gallery of them:

Some of the pebble paintings above are my early watercolour sketches, some are newer and some are sketchbook pages.

I love painting anything connected to the beach. But I’ve also found that painting pebbles is a simple, very effective way to practice a wide variety of watercolour techniques: wet in wet, wet on dry, dry brush, blending colours, creating 3D shapes on the flat surface of the paper, colour mixing, salt patterns, wax resist, layering washes, glazing, painting details… etc. Once learnt, all of these techniques I can use to paint anything I want…

The techniques I used in quite a few of the pebble watercolours above, I learnt from this DVD by Hazel Soan. It’s brilliant. I can’t give you a link as I don’t know where you can buy it. I highly recommend it if you can find a copy.

I bought this DVD about 6 years ago, but the publishing date on it is actually 2005. BUT the techniques in it, superbly demonstrated by Hazel Soan, are as relevant and valuable today as they were when it was first published; and they will still be relevant and valuable in another 10 years time.

The bottom line is this: Watercolour is timeless. It will never go out of date. Watercolour techniques will never date either. Watercolour will always be a stunningly beautiful medium to work with…