Hope Springs Eternal : Part 2

My third, and current, attempt at learning to be a competent watercolor painter wasn’t going real well. I was highly motivated and my watching YouTube videos about watercolor painting was inspirational, but no matter what, I felt something was missing. Intuitively I knew that there was some fundamental gap in my understanding. Presenters would say things like watercolor acts like it has a mind of it’s own, you can’t totally control it.  I didn’t want total control, but up to this point I didn’t have much if any control. That sat in the back of my mind as I continued to search for a clue as to what I was missing. I kept searching for videos on beginning lessons in watercolor painting. They kept falling short. Obviously it had to be some relationship between the water, the paper and the paint. But every video seemed to just say that’s something you learn with lots of practice. Seriously, what a cop out, all the practice in the world is pretty useless unless you have a clue about what you need to be practicing.

Then one day, I came upon a YouTube video with the not very exciting title “The Basics Of WaterColor Painting”. It was one of a 5 part series of same named videos on a year old YouTube channel that only had about 83 subscribers and the videos have been there over a year at the time with only a few hundred views and maybe 15 likes. In YouTube terms that is not a good recommendation. To top things off, each of the 5 videos was really long, almost an hour each or more.  That’s a big investment in time which obviously not many folks had wanted to invest based on the number of views. And remember the view count doesn’t even mean that 83 people actually watched the whole video. They might have started watching and bailed when they determined it wasn’t worth the time. The channel only contained 6 videos, 5 of which were these “Basics” series ones and the other one seemed to be a painting demo which was, you guessed it, also over an hour long. Guaranteed that 99% of YouTube watchers that landed on this channel immediately clicked off and went elsewhere. I almost did myself. But before I invested my time watching the first video, I figured it was worth a Google search on the artist / presenter just to see if he had actually done any real watercolor painting and did he know anything about the subject. He had and he most certainly knew plenty. In fact, just from the Google search, I realized that he was probably one of the most knowledgable and accomplished watercolor artists making YouTube videos. These videos certainly deserved a watch. I only hoped that he was as good at teaching as he was at painting. That turned out to be a huge understatement. I had stumbled on to pure 24 caret gold.

Post Update 11/28/2018 : The YouTube video channel, mentioned above, that I “discovered” in July of 2017 is titled Russell Black Watercolor . Russell Black is an American artist /painter born in Northridge Calif. and currently resides in St. George, Utah. You can see samples of his work on Flickr. Since the time when I started watching Russell’s videos on YouTube, the number of videos has grown from 6 to 41 and the number of subscribers from 87 to 515. It is the absolute best resource for learning to paint in watercolor and surprisingly still almost undiscovered. A bit of a warning, Russell does not suffer fools gladly, which is my way of saying that he is a generous teacher but doesn’t tolerate arguments or disagreements about what he is teaching. He is extremely generous with his knowledge and experience. You can take it or leave it. But he’s not interested in your opinions. Questions are welcomed but ask them and accept his answers, don’t start a debate or try to impress him with your “knowledge”, perspectives or viewpoints. It won’t be appreciated. You have the opportunity to be taught by a very talented and accomplished professional artist,  just show him the respect that he expects and deserves.

Post Update 11/13/2020 : Well, what can I say except “ah crap!” the Russell Black Watercolor Youtube channel is pretty much an empty shell at the moment. I can’t really comment on the “why” but Mr. Black just deleted 90% of his posted content which is a great tragedy for all who needed his instructional help. Hopefully he will decide to do something again, but for now this great resource is gone.