Happy Holidays!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!

Beginning Watercolor

The Beginning Watercolor class also ended this week. I only had three students for this session. That meant we were able to cover quite a bit of material in a six week session.

Gayle Brown2

The first week we learned about the watercolor paper (we use Arches 140lb coldpress right from the start), brushes and practice painting wet on dry, wet in wet, and dry brushing. We practiced washes and compared mixing colors on our palettes and mixing colors on the paper. Their first assignment was to paint a back lit scene.

Gayle Brown

The second week we learned how to create trees in different ways. This included using a sponge, pontillism and scumbling. I also introduced liquid frisket and showed different ways it could be used.

Kathy Gordon

On the third week we talked about man-made objects and buildings, perspective and how to grid our paper to assist with drawing our buildings. We talked about how buildings are man-made and composed of geometric shapes. We also talked about how we could look for negative space to put our buildings together. I also taught them how to soften a line by tickling a hard edge while it is still wet.

Rose Clair5

On the fourth week we discussed clouds and the different techniques we could use to create them. We also talked about painting water and waves and what we can use to create snow.

Rose Clair

Kathy Gordon5

The fifth week was devoted to learning to paint little people.

On the last night of class we worked on an elegant writer painting. They were not able to finish these for me to photograph but all three had a great start!

If you would like to view more of their paintings, please click here or scroll to the top of the page and click on Student Art: beginning Watercolor in the list of pages. You can enlarge any of the above paintings by clicking on them twice.

Thank you to all my students who contributed their art to this page.  🙂

Student Art: Watercolor Landscape 2015

We just finished our 2015 class on Watercolor Landscape.

Ruth Karau4

We discussed elements of composition as they relate to composition. We discussed how so many landscape paintings are devoid of little people or animals making the scene look empty. We all designed our paintings to include little people or animals.

Sue Joseph3

Melissa Scare2

The next week, we discussed value changes in the landscape and how the artist can control that. The whole class crated paintings using the Elegant Writer for this assignment.

Cherie Droege2

We talked about buildings and man-made objects in a landscape and created landscapes with man-made objects or buildings in them.

Henn Laidroo2

Jan Reche4

We spent a session on  big sky, water or snow paintings and techniques for making clouds, waves and snow.

Cindy Guzik

For the last week, everyone painted a landscape that could be on the front of a Christmas card.

If yu would like to view any of the above paintings in a larger form, just click on it twice. All the students’ paintings can be viewed by clicking here or by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking on the Student Art: Watercolor Landscape tab. There are over 70 student paintings in that gallery.

Thank you to all my students for their hard work as well as contributions to making this class experience so enjoyable…and for sharing your work so others can view it.

July Pasture

I experimented, here. I liked the sky in the reference for this scene and added the horses.

I see the snow has begun to fall for our Holiday posts and this one is going to look a little funny with the snow coming down. Sorry about that. I know I can turn it off but kind of like that we get this treat once a year.