Watercoloring Between the Lines

I've received some more requests for pictures of my painting, so I thought I would talk a little bit more about how my watercolor class works. Each class, my teacher has us do a different painting that teaches certain skills. Like I said, it's pretty prescriptive so that we can imitate the techniques. He tells us exactly what to draw, and which colors to use. However, because we're mixing colors, they don't exactly turn out the same from person to person. So even though we're being told exactly what to do, everyone ends up with a slightly different painting. I should note these photos aren't the best. I should have taken them earlier when the sun was out and I could have used natural light, but well, I didn't.

This painting was in my third class. We were taught "negative space", i.e. painting the shadows in between the trees, splatter painting, and shadows.

Later I tried to use the negative space concept to create a painting of my own. This is supposed to be two kookaburras sitting on a branch in a forest. Ethan and I had quite a laugh over how the "forest" looks like wallpaper and the kookaburra on the left looks like a duck.

In my fourth class, we learned about reflections. I was not very happy with my trees in this painting, but I learned a lot about how to do reflections and that was very useful.

After that, I reattempted a painting of Mt. Susitna that I had done earlier. This is probably my best painting so far. I kind of copied it from a photograph, though, so it's not a work of genius or anything.

My fifth and final class in Watercolor I, we learned more about shadows: how to correctly place them on the ground. I did not use these techniques in another painting (yet).

I've really been enjoying the class, and some of the other students convinced me to sign up for Watercolor II. In the first class, we did this painting, where we learned how to use a scrubber brush and learned more about shadows again. (There's a lot to learn about shadows!) I was moderately happy with this one. The steam looks a little explosive, though.

Watercolor II is different every session, so some people take it over and over again. This meant there were some very good artists in the class and I had to remind myself not to compare my painting with theirs. After this, we're painting a larger painting -- and I guess it's going to take the remaining 4 sessions! This sounds like a lot of room for compounding errors to me. But I guess it also means I'll have more time to fix things. I hope.