There's still much to discover and rediscover in the conservation area at Kampong Glam. In this sketch, line art was done on location opposite the building. We were sitting comfortably in a coffeeshop and crab restaurant enjoying the shade and breeze. The sketch took a while but it was fun to do especially when you have a company. I took the drawing home to add colour from memory and from the photo I took when I completed the sketch. The idea is to bring out the atmosphere we experienced and the light but not directly copying from the photo. It's a lot more satisfying this way.

There are a few principles I follow when adding light and shadow with watercolour:

• use transparent washes and glazes
• use complementary hues to mix greys for shadows
• choose a facade of the building for light and the other for shadow
• the facade that gets the light may have more white or saturated colour
• interiors need darks, same goes to whatever that is under the roof or awning
• shadows indicates the direction of light - opened windows will cast a shadow on the facade of the building
• the sky and clouds should be abstracted
• keep the brush strokes loose and vary the shapes painted

While cleaning my work area, I found a dried up titanium white gouache tube that has been lying around for while. Not wanting to waste the pigment, I did some reading up and found a way to recycle or reactivate any dried up pigment. Here's the instruction in a visual presentation.

Process of recycling dried up pigment for water based pigments.