Learning to watercolor....

Watercolor painting has been one kind of art I have long wanted to to learn how to do.  Properly.  I've taken a class or two.  I've bought all the brushes, paper and books.  I've dabbled and it was not good.  But the desire is still there, stronger than ever.  So this last year I took another couple of classes and whether or not there was any improvement in skill...there was at least a profound enjoyment of the process.  That feels like progress enough for now.  The latest class I took was online, one of Online Card Classes offerings and Dawn Woleslagle was the main teacher.  FINALLY, things began to make sense and to actually work!!  Here are some of the cards made from the class samples I worked on.

We started with washes.  I love a good wash.  They aren't so difficult, because they don't have to resemble anything real.  But they still make you feel like a "real" artist.


Then we played around with the shapes our brushes make.  This sort of resembles a flower.  And it's just good practice with getting comfortable with the brush.

More brushwork along with color blending.  My favorite thing of all. 

For these card/samples, we drew basic shapes lightly with pencil and then blended color in again.  The unpredictability of the results is a big part of the fun with this technique.



 This technique showcases glazing.  It's where you lay on color, let it dry, and then lay on another color over top to let the transparency of the two actually change their color.  I did this one inspired by another of the teachers, Laura Bassen.
 

And finally, we finished up with more brush work.  Again, a vague resemblance to a rose.  Sort of.  
 


I'm heading north shortly, to spend the summer at the lake, where I hope to have oodles and oodles of time to pull the supplies out and dabble again and hopefully, improve while I'm at it!

Thanks for checking in again today!

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