New Student Art: Watercolor Plus Fun!

We just finished our last class of the school year 2014-2015 last night. I save this class until the end each year because it is composed of five different ways to use watercolor with other mediums. It is designed to stretch our creativity and give us other options to use when creating our paintings. It is probably the most challenging of the classes because these take an investment of time that some of the other classes don’t require.

Kathleen Smierciak2

The first week we worked on anything ink and watercolor.

Linda Flatley2

Jan Reche2

The second week we worked on Gouache Resist.

Mary Smierciak

Sue Joseph4

On the third week we learned how to make gesso juice, apply it to our paper and create texture in it.

Melissa Scare

Roxanne Yoquelet

The fourth week was devoted to learning how to treat National Geographic photos with CitraSolv to make beautifully colored collage papers and use them to create watercolor and collage paintings.

Nancy Longmate5

Ruth Karau3

On the fifth week we worked on creating paintings using wax resist.

On the sixth and last night everyone worked on a technique where they paint into a soaked piece of watercolor paper, developing the painting as it dries. They could even use pastels and work them into the watercolor.

If you would like to view the other paintings created by these students you can click here or scroll to the top of the page and click on the page that says Student Art: Watercolor Plus 2015.

Thank you to all my students who shared their work here! 🙂

CitraSolv and a Bearded Vulture

I had so much fun creating this image! This bird caught my eye the minute I saw the reference photo on wet canvas. I think it was just listed as a vulture. Thank you to wet canvas for continuing to supply artists with inspiration through your reference library!

When I first drew this bird, I did not include the beard because the background in the reference photo was so dark you could not see it. The other thing I was intrigued by was the full hood and crest of feathers, which were mostly white in the reference photo.  Ha! I began a search for this strange bird and found him and his hood and crest were red or reddish brown! Those in the wild “dust bathe” and the red coloration comes from the soil. I found a good description of him here. The reference photo was probably of a bird kept in captivity. Their hood and crest are generally white.

I began this with a line drawing and painted the entire bird and background before I added CitraSolv collage papers to his wings and hood. Click here if you would like to learn how to create these beautiful collage papers and use them in a watercolor painting.

I just read a really creative post on Carol King’s blog here. She used an Elegant Writer pen to design her composition and then painted into it to cause the ink to run. I took the time to watch the video about the technique and wish I could have tried it with this vulture prior to painting and collaging him. I am definitely going to try the Elegant Writer, watercolor and citrasolv as a mixed media this summer on my break. Thank you, Carol, and all of you bloggers who continue to share what you learn! I first learned of citrasolv from Carol’s blog, also.

Some fun with Gouache Resist: Portraits

 

 

We just finished working on gouache resists in my class. If you would like to try this technique, I have described the process here. I have used this technique for a landscape, animals, and still life but had not tried a human portrait. I used a really interesting book titled “Facial Expressions” by Mark Simon. It is a book of references of hundreds of expressions done by people of all ages to be used as reference material. I want to try doing a family member in gouache resist. This was an interesting project and fun to do.

Gesso Juice: Golden Horse

 

My class is working on watercolors painted on a gessoed piece of 140 lb Arches coldpress paper. We mix the gesso by using one half gesso, one quarter water and one quarter acrylic matte medium. We then use a large brush to spread this mixture onto our watercolor paper. Before the gesso dries, we  take a credit card and make marks in that wet gessoed surface. Some of us have stirred art sand into the mixture as well. The card marks and slashes, plus the sand, give an interesting textured surface to paint on, once dried. I have posted a tutorial here if you would like to follow it and try this interesting technique. You can also click on the image of the horse, above, to get a better look at the texture of the surface. I have read, recently, where you can take cut out papers and gesso them into the surface as well. I would like to experiment with that this summer.