Advancing with Watercolor: Brushwork - Reflections - Joy with the Brush

BRUSHWORK - REFLECTIONS

Reflections on water is a inspiring and challenging subject to paint. Reflections themselves can be mirror images of those objects casting them but are often be distorted by the water surface, wind moving across the surface, waves large and small. That is one of the questions I seek to understand before putting brush to paper - What is the water surface like?
In todays exercise we will look at a calm harbor where the waves are minimal but do influence the character of the reflections

And so our watercolor vocabulary grows with each project - building confidence and at the same time a natural curiosity. This curiosity is so valuable and leads us to more understanding.Our brush is a tool but the value of this tool grows with each painting...

Over time the brush becomes the extension of the your hand, and ultimately of your heart -

WHAT WILL YOU NEED THIS WEEK

Brushes
We will use a wide variety of brushes this week.

The Cat’s tongue 1” and some sabelettes #10, #4 Also a wide 2” brush to get our washes started Paper

2 - 12 x 16 sheets of Saunders 140 rough Color
Sepia for the tonal study
For the demo I will use

Yellow Ochre, Lavender, cobalt turquoise Burnt Sienna, and left overs :)

WHAT WILL WE DO THIS WEEK

We will start with a tonal study of our subject identifying the lights and darks and then translate this into color

THIS WEEKS DRILL

In addition to the tonal study we are doing together as a warm up I am including 2 other studies in the Gumroad Package.

You can see images of the studies below with smaller windows to give you an idea of my working surface and brush “posture”