Painting Up A Storm!

In my last post, I mentioned taking a watercolor class.  Our first homework assignment was to draw a thumbnail sketch of what we wanted to paint for our masterpiece and then draw a "cartoon" of what it would look like full size.  The instructor really liked my cartoon -- which surprised me because I think it's rather rudimentary.  He thinks it would be fun if I did an impressionist painting.  Me, I'm not sure.

The day I was to take my cartoon to class, it was raining.  Look what I came up with to protect my cartoon!  My classmates thought it was ingenius. LOL

During the second week of class, we learned about and practiced watercolor painting techniques: Wet on Wet, Wet on Damp, Wet on Dry, Washes, Hard Edge/Soft Edge, and Drybrushing.

The instructor walked us through doing our first class painting project using the techniques we learned and practiced.

I thought my painting was going along swimmingly well until the instructor had us "lift" fog into our paintings.  He said my paint lifted a little too well.  I think my fog bank is too wide.  Not bad though, for a first time using some of these techniques.  We also got to use frisket which is really useful to maintain white highlights.

Week three, we learned how to paint florals.  Mine is still a work in progress.

Another student and I have been meeting once a week outside of class to do our homework and practice painting.  I'm trying to get this floral done so I can move on to my "masterpiece" which is supposed to be mostly done by next week. I haven't even started painting it yet. Yikes!

Week four, we learned about painting skies and water.  While my clouds look okay, I think they're way too dark for the water below.

Rocks and trees will be taught in the next classes.  The white areas in the previous painting are where the rocks and trees will go.

In a different class offered by the park district, I learned how to paint trees.  The instructor remembered me from when I took the floral class back in June.  He asked if I'd been doing some painting because I was using techniques I learned elsewhere.  I finished painting one tree and started on a second.

Until next time...