I am horrible at remembering to take pictures anywhere, but once in a while someone will say something that reminds me. We have been having so much fun in our watercolor class, and have just completed our 4th of 6 weeks. I thought I would share some of what we’ve learned, and the few pictures that I remembered to take!

We start off getting to know the colors that will be on our palette, or the main colors, I add a few more as we go along. These are mainly primary colors with a couple of greens and Payne’s gray added as well because they’re nice convenience colors. I try to have 2 of each primary, a warm and a cool of each.

I am always amazed when we swatch and then start mixing the colors how much variety is in each color, and the vast variation of colors each student achieves. They were also amazed at how different everyone’s swatches were. We then painted a zebra face, but I didn’t remember to take a picture that day, so I had to remember to take a picture the next week of at least one zebra.

The second and third weeks were all about technique, and we finished several small, quick paintings but I didn’t remember to take a picture of those.

This past Monday we started in on more finished paintings. I do 3 weeks of technique, and 3 weeks of application of techniques in a more finished form. I always ask the class what they’d like to paint, because I want to paint things they’re interested in, then the students are more invested. Several people mentioned birds, and a couple of people mentioned ravens. So ravens it was.

When I started to look for raven pictures online, I wanted something somewhat simple, but also something that showed all the variety of colors that a raven’s feathers can have in the sunlight. I found a raven head that I decided would work. It was quite detailed, so we had to simplify it down somewhat, but I wanted to teach them how to have some detail, and then tone down detail without losing it all. I also wanted to teach a little bit about negative painting.

This was a fun class. It was a quiet class. Each student was focused on their work and it was fun to see the different creations that each person finished, or had in progress by the time our time was up. I am always so impressed by how far people have come from the first class to this fourth class, and how excited they still are to come and paint!

Watercolor is not an easy medium to learn because it likes to do it’s own thing to some extent. But it is a fun one when you start to learn how to somewhat control, somewhat because when it dries sometimes it doesn’t look like you expect, but you never know until it’s dry!

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