Lifting out

If you have a section of watercolour painting you consider too dark, one solution is to lift out some of the paint. This is not always possible with staining pigments, or if you have laid many washes. In the painting below of Langport during the flood of 2014, I had painted the mid ground too dark, the whole section was fragmented and the church sat awkwardly.

To modify this problem I wetted the area and tried to lift out the paint with kitchen paper, but without success. Remembering something I'd seen on YouTube I repeated the process using a piece of Magic Sponge bought online. The result homogenised the layer with a misty unity creating, what I think, is a reasonable painting.