Capturing Wetlands with Watercolours

Adib Noh
3 min readJan 17, 2022

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Abstract of Marshy Lands

As a civil engineer with a special interest in water engineering, I love wetlands. It is a very important component of our water and environmental ecosystem. Whenever I go cycling to Putrajaya, I will cycle along the gravel tracks around Putrajaya Wetlands. As an avid photographer, I took many interesting and colourful photos of the trees, flowers, marshlands, ponds and lakes. Later, I make them into photobooks.

In the last two years, I was engaged with young artists as their business coach. Every year, our National Art Gallery selected twenty young artists to be coached by to become artist-entrepreneur. During the course of my engagement, I slowly became interested in watercolour artworks. Beginning in October 2021, I started to learn how to sketch and paint watercolours. There are so many online tutorials I can learn to paint watercolours. Here are a few of them.

Doing watercolours painting is a real hard work when I compare to taking a photo. There are so much to learn about the paints, the brushes, the papers etc. I made a lot of mistakes in the last four months but I keep painting or sketching every day. After three months, I could see some improvement here and there but I have a long way to go. In photography, the guru said our first 10,000 photos are rubbish. By the way, as of now January 2022 I have a collection of more than 100,000 photos in my Flickr account. I hope 10% is good.

My watercolours indulgence is not for business. It is my way of relaxation and at times it works as a therapy for me. By doing a painting I now really appreciate the works of artists. It taught me to pay more attention to details and be more patient.

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Adib Noh

Project & Business Consultant/Coach with more than 30 years of experience. I am an engineer,entrepreneur,writer and enjoy cycling and photography.