What you can do with some watercolour and paper!

This week I held another Art Blossoms Painting Day (I refuse to use the word “workshop” as it conjures up images of people doing difficult and unpleasant activities and anyway art isn’t work!)

Mary showing the poppies who's boss! — Mary showing the poppies who’s boss!

Two sisters – Mary and Pam came over from Tonyrefail and Efail Isaf respectively to build on their watercolour skills.

They had requested activities on flowers and animals and some general watercolour techniques on how to create a good composition from a complicated floral landscape scene.

Using the wet into wet technique Pam was soon creating poetic poppies

For our flowers we did a magical blue himalayan poppy. Using wet into wet for the background we simply lifted out any colour that went over the flowers and then painted those in when the background was dry!

This is what you might get if you follow along with the demo in this post - good luck! — This is what you might get if you follow along with the demo in this post – good luck!

Here is the demo if you want a go and please – send me in pics of how you do?

The animal we painted was a simple greeny-yellow seahorse which allowed for loose and atmospheric painting of underwashes before tightening with accents and shadows as the painting dried.

Seahorses are delightful to paint in watercolour

Again – have a little dabble and maybe use different colours.

I like my students to paint an eye as this is considered a tricky subject and I want to show how to tackle it with ease. What do you think of their very first attempts below? Not bad at all if you ask me 🙂

After a brief eye demo by me Pam and Mary knocked out these two fab eyes:)

We had a lovely day batting cat back and forth as we worked about watercolour, art, drawing, places we had visited in the world and despite the heatwave outside my north lit painting room kept us bearably cool.

Thanks for coming Pam and Mary and I hope you continue to build on what you did during your day.

If you fancy watercolour tuition and live in the South Wales Valleys area give me a call on 01443 791532 or email me at eastwitching@hotmail.com – we can sort out a day or half day tailored to your needs!