Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 3

PANSY!!!!



That's what we worked on during the final class. This class focused on blending like with the narcissus, but also on glazing. I obviously didn't finish because I felt compelled to create massive flowers, the likes of which will only rival O'Keefe's.

Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 2

Blooming....

ugh.



If you can get this technique right, you can created lovely organic edges to things. But more than likely, mastery of the technique will elude you and you will do what I did and just scribble in the mess with your brush.

Watercolor Techniques: Floral fun Day 1

Oh watercolor, how I love thee.

I took another watercolor class at Wyndham Art Supplies (with Karen Kesteloot). This time it was a three day workshop on creating flowers in watercolor using some more creative and watercolor specific techniques such as 'blooming', salt and masking.



The first day we just spent some time mucking about with the paint and learning to create specific effects.

Happy Summer

The weather's been lovely lately. As long as I'm well ventilated and not running around in a rush, I'm really enjoying it. Also, I can actually get a bit of sun (tasty tasty vitamin D). This is probably the closest I get to nature, letting my skin feel the breeze and the sunshine. It's one of those times of the year where I actually want to be outside and get all in-tuned with nature. Fall and Spring are ok, but Winter is crap and I have no desire to be outside most of the time. Even in Fall and Spring, you're covered up. I rarely find those times of year particularly inspirational, other than inspiring me to bitch.

Below are some things that were inspired by summery-ness. The two painting are from a 'Painting Nature' class that I took last summer at the Arboretum. At the end I tossed in a poem I made sometime last year.

Native Ontario Columbine

Watercolor Techniques at Wyndham Art Supplies

The last few posts have been about my watercolor paintings, and I mentioned the course I took a while ago, but fail to go into detail. Well, here it is...

In May and June I took a watercolor techniques course at Wyndham Art Supplies. It was a great class. I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn how to handle this medium, as I find it is one of the more difficult ones. With acrylic, it's quite easy to just use straight out of the tube. If you make a mistake, you can go over it (in theory).

I've always liked the idea of watercolor, but I never really knew how to use it properly. I liked that Karen provided simple instructions like: Watercolor, no matter how intense the pigment, is supposed to have the consistency of...water.

The other thing I liked about the class was that while we learned techniques, we actually made finished pieces. Which is much more satisfying that having sheets and sheets of practice.

Painting the First: Aurora Borealis.
For this painting we learned about wet on wet techniques for the sky (along with a kind of paper mounting). We also learned some dry brush techniques for the tree silhouettes.

Independent watercolor

So, I just did a wonderful watercolor course at Wyndham Art Supplies and I learned TONS! It was nice to get some technical instruction, but more on the course later.

I bought a bunch of watercolor supplies for my birthday and yesterday was the first day that I did some painting on my own since the course ended, more importantly, it was a completely novel idea, not a copy of something we did in class. It was nice. It's a really small piece and it took me several hours (with all of the waiting), but it finally gave me a chance to use the silver and gold watercolors that I failed to resist in the store. Fortunately, the masking fluid (see above) resisted the washes really well (hoho) and I got a really bright silver moon and vibrant golden hare.

I've had a bit of a thing with hares lately. For a long time, I had an affinity with rabbits. No, it's not because of their breeding habits. In second year, I took part in a guided meditation for a poetry course. When we were asked to visualize an animal, I got a rabbit and it stuck. The change into a hare specifically came recently. Mostly I really REALLY like a line from Terry Pratchet's newest Tiffany Aching book "I shall Wear Midnight":

"The hare runs into the fire.
The hare runs into the fire.

The fire it takes her, she is not burned.
The fire it loves her, she is free"

There will probably be a few more peices involving hares.

Anyway, below is the finished product. It's not perfect, but I'm really quite proud of it. I painted it on this recycled cotton paper that has a really textured finish. I think it gave it a nice effect.

Colours: Indigo, prussian blue, olive green, hooker's green, veridian, pyrelene green, alizarin crimson, (to mute the greens), quinacridone gold, cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, gold and silver.

Father's Day gifts

My parents live far away, so gift giving tends to be difficult to say the least. I've found that the easiest gifts tend to be paper in nature. So I'll paint something for a holiday or birthday and send it to them. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than mailing something three-dimensional. Also, I can say that it's just documents and there's never any duties on their end. Here are two paintings I made for my Dad and the corresponding mess.