Monochromatic Watercolor and the Landscape

The above watercolors were painted with the idea of studying value transitions in the landscape. It is the first assignment for my Watercolor Landscape class this session. We were to use one or two colors and enhance the depth by making decisions on how to divide the space in the landscape with value changes. We were to pay attention to not dividing our scenes in half with value and to make dramatic enough changes to provide contrast and depth. The above two paintings were painted with  neutral tint watercolor paint and the bottom one was painted with burnt sienna and prussian blue.

I felt a sense of freedom painting these studies. It allowed me to pay attention to the composition and division of space as well as to concentrate on my brush techniques by taking the pressure off of having to think about color. I learned that we need to push the contrast in order to enhance the feeling of depth in a scene.  I will do more of these in the future. It was fun.

New Student Art: Beginning Drawing and Watercolor Portraits

Perspective of kitchen corner: Jan Mitchell

Still Life Study: Mary Larson

Portrait: Andrea Andis

Portrait: Sheryl Seelig

The above artwork are a few of the examples you will find on the Student Art 3 page. I just completed a Beginning Drawing and a Watercolor Portrait Class this week. Each session runs only 6 weeks. Many of the students return to take classes again.

I want to take the time to thank each and every student for their efforts and their incredible growth. Thank you, also, for sharing your work through this blog. YOU ROCK!!!!!

Stablemates

The photo reference for this painting came from the photo reference library on wet canvas. A student of mine found the photo and offered it to me to try.  Thank you, Henn!

Due to lack of time to paint, recently, I have been working on these two horses for about a month of short sessions. I decided to try 140 lb Hot Press paper due to the detail in the wood grain and because I wanted something a little more realistic. I am still a novice with hot press paper but like it for painting horse portraiture. What intrigued me the most about this scene were the shapes; the straight mechanical lines against the organic lines of the horses’ heads.  This portrait was painted in layers. I painted the background areas right along with the horses’ heads. That helped me to be able to see the values and save my light areas. The most difficult part for me was the wood.

Studying a Face: Starting Portraiture

Eye

Nose

Tiger Eyes

Horse Mouth

Recently I began a watercolor portrait class. When I have taught this class, in prior years, we have jumped right in and begun drawing and painting the whole portrait. About halfway through each class I begin to get questions about how to: paint an eye, paint a nose, paint a mouth. This year I decided to begin the class a little different and demonstrated how I paint an eye and a nose. How there is not much to either but that we rarely take time to study them, separately, in previous classes. This year we took an entire week to just paint pieces and parts of the face and it has made a huge difference. We discussed how much brighter our colors were if we mixed them on the paper as opposed to the palette. We worked with layering the colors on the paper, or mingling them wet-in-wet and came up with examples like the above. Note the various colors to make the grays in the horse’s mouth or the indications of red and gold in the tiger’s black stripes. Both those colors were created with layers of varying reds, yellows and blues. We discussed the varying shades of reds and yellows and blues we had available to create skin tones and how much more vibrant those tones were when we painted them wet-in-wet and reserved the darker tones for the shadows or the rosey colors for the cheeks.  We talked about shadows cast under the eyelid, on an eye, or under the upper lip on the teeth.

Next we put these pieces and parts together and just created faces. That seemed to get this class rolling and there have been fewer problems with face parts as a result. I created the following faces:

Child’s Face

Woman’s Face

Man’s Face