Sta.sh
My parents and I have started a beginning watercolour class. I have a little experience with watercolours, but have never had any instruction. This class is proving to be quite fun and informative. We've been having a great time.
We do lots of little exercises, which I'm not going to bother posting, because visually they're rather boring (just swatches of colour, basically). I did post a couple of examples of painting over a corn starch base, even though the pictures are simple abstracts, to show what it looks like. I've never done that technique before and it was rather fun!
Today, we did the ski scene. It was rather interesting. We first wet the top half of the paper, above the slanted horizon line. Then we dropped pure blue paint into the water and let it run around, tilting the pad this way and that, and just letting it spread out. Then came the trees, which was just paint applied to the wet blue wash and kind of smudged around to make vague tree-like blobs. I added a bit of red to the green to darken it a bit. Then when it was somewhat drier, we took a palette knife and cut the branch formations into the paint. I'd never ever used a palette knife on a watercolour painting before, so I had no idea what to expect. What came out was really quite interesting!! I think I did a better job with the knife on the second version, but both are pretty acceptable.
The only real problem I ran into was the backwashes. It looked fine when it was wet, but it dried into that horrible blob that's so visible in the painting. I need to figure out how to get moisture off the paper without taking pigment off. On one exercise I did previously, I tried to blot up the moisture with a paper towel, but it ended up taking all the pigment off as well, so that was a flop. The instructor recommends we use a dry brush to pick it up, but I've had no luck with that as well. Somehow I have to figure out how to keep the paper from getting so wet. Ah well, that's why i'm in a class!
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