The Donkey

  Value Sketch

The evening of the first day of the workshop, I sat down and did my pre-sketch of a donkey for the next day. I also drew a line drawing of her on watercolor paper so that I would have something to start working on the second day of the workshop. Don spent the morning talking about granular washes and demonstrated how he paints them. He said these can be done with any name brand of watercolors. He spoke of specific colors and divided them up into three groups of light, medium and dark colors. I learned how important it was to know which colors are light , medium and dark. I had always found a color I liked and added more water if I wanted it to be lighter. In essence, what I was doing is really saturating that color and not allowing it to be what it was designed for which was to be  a dark. Sounds like a “no-brainer” but I had never connected with this before. I am going to have to spend some time with my colors, now, and decide which ones fit into which values because I like this way of thinking and painting.  He showed us different color combinations and how to turn our paintings on with the midtones. He also talked about different kinds of contrasts to include in our paintings.  The whole time we should be thinking of  contrasts of neutrals and colors, lights and darks, lost edges and hard edges and finding places for all of it.

Following the demonstration and discussion, I decided I needed to work out some granular washes on a separate sheet of paper. I chose the colors I thought I might use to paint my donkey so I could see how they mixed. Here are the washes I tried:

   Neutrals  Colors

Then I painted my donkey, below:

I hope I can remember all of this as I continue painting. It is my new goal.