Friday, October 15, 2010

Intro to Watercolor - Week 1


I started teaching Intro to Watercolor at Lake Harriet Community Education, 4912 Vincent Avenue South. Here are my notes and some images I wanted to share with the class from week 1.

--

To review, tonight we talked about value. The lightness or darkness of a color. We made four squares on our paper and practiced flat wash, gradient wash, dry brush, and wet into wet. We made five squares further down on that piece of paper and made the first one pure hue then each next square gradually lighter in value. We did this by dipping our brush into paint for the first square, then once into water for next square, dip it twice for 3rd square, dip it three times… and so on, each square lighter in value due to less of the original pigment remaining on the brush.


Then we did a painting based on Georgia O'Keefe's abstract sunset using wet into wet for the bottom third - and two colors in the rainbow arc of the sunset. We planned our copy of her painting to leave some white paper. Leaving white of the paper is a very important watercolor technique.


Okeefe image here: http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2009/07/09/1247187476_3472/539w.jpg



We also talked about making a grid of your colors and seeing how they look as gradient washes. For each color from your set of tubes or pans, make a square on a grid on paper to refer to in your studio.

Here is that list of materials...

Materials


Pencil

Kneaded eraser

Masking tape

2 wide mouth water containers (12 oz or so)

Large board for mounting wet paper 16x20 inches

Masking tape

Watercolor paper 140# Strathmore cold press 11x14 (or Arches, Lana Aquarelle, or Fabriano Artistico)

Watercolor brushes #8 round, #2 round, 1 inch flat

White plastic palette with lid

Tube watercolors (Winsor Newton, M. Graham & Co., Utrecht)

Permanent Alizarine Crimson

Cadmium Red or Scarlet Lake or Napthol Red

Ultramarine Blue (or French Ultramarine Blue)

Thalo Green or Winsor Green

Lemon Yellow or Hansa Yellow

Cadmium Yellow Medium

Burnt Sienna

Burnt Umber

No comments: