Watercolors Are Hard.

I recently did a two weekend watercolor workshop through the USCAD program at the U of S and I thought that I would post some of what I did.  I discovered that watercolor painting is not an easy thing to master.  Mixing vibrant colors was especially difficult for me.  It was also difficult having two other classes and working part time while it was going on...I am very tired now.

For the first weekend we did a lot of color mixing exercises and learned to find the lightest lights and the darkest darks first when painting.

We did some drapery studies.

And a whole lot of still lives.

We also did a winter landscape from a photograph.

For the second week we were encouraged to take what we had learned from the first week and try out different styles of watercolor painting.    We worked from photographs again and did some portraiture.

I tried out pointillism.

We also did an exercise where we had to paint the picture upside down in splotches of color.

We did a timed still life.

On the last day we had a model.  We did some warm up gestures and some quick paintings with a limited color palette.

This warm up painting ended up looking like an amazon woman...

And this one ended up looking like a fancy cave woman...

My longer pose turned out a little better, but it could still use a lot of work.

Then I did a quick tree study.

And another still life.  My teacher told me to try a more vibrant color palette.  That didn't work out so well, hahaha.

We also got to do a non-winter landscape, and I chose to do one of Loch Shiel in Scotland.  I went on a Harry Potter fan trip a couple of years ago and this was one of the coolest places that we visited.  It is also where they filmed a bunch of parts of the Harry Potter movies!  If you look really closely you might even see Harry riding Buckbeak over the water in the distance... 

I also tried playing around with some watercolor pencils that I had bought.  It wasn't turning out so great until I added some ink for the outline and gave him some fruity friends.  None of them are happy to see that pear though...