Advancing with Watercolor: Winter Meditations "Stream through the Snow"

FINISH WITH A SPRINT

We have been looking at edges in this term - each painting had a variety of edges with a focus on a particular type - Along the way we started to recognize how edges became a means to express hard light or soft light clarity or dreaminess. These ideas will help in shaping our future paintings especially when we want to express our inner world through our watercolors.In this week we will come to know a scene of a stream wandering through new fallen snow - After this first painting I would like to challenge myself by doing a short performance or a quick painting of the same subject. I put away there references and paint ?by Heart” the result manifests itself internally by allowing me to work with watercolor outside of copy mode and more in create and respond mode…This week as we work on homework lets repeat this process and paint 2 paintings one a immersive study - the second a free improvisation..

WHAT WE WILL DO THIS WEEK

I am working with a vertical layout in both pieces and start with a few pencil lines to place the big shapes…

I am using cad yellow light, yellow ochre, cad orange red, burnt Sienna, cobalt and and some titanium white  in creating my mixtures. Again - use what you have.

Brushes

A large flat 2” and a 1 inch flat, a couple of sabelette rounds large and small..also my favorite well worms brush that is great for creating patterns - sorry, but not available in any store

Tape, spay bottle, paper towel, hair dryer

THE SPRINT

The drill we do this week will be of a different mindset - instead of using the drill as a warm up to prepare us for our work we will use the drill as a way to channel our experience in the previous painting into a performance or a sprint painting - a smaller painting of the same subject - with the attitude that we will do a quick version - not allowing ourselves to “correct” or even judge the painting as we produce it.

THE DEMO

First we will place our pencil marks lightly on the paper - the i need a few moments to think about the process of building op the fish tomes of shadows and snow. I like the photo but i understand that the contrast present is somewhat to flat so I will make the snow darker even though it is white …. Counter logic but I have seen many such photos where the lens struggles to capture the mid darks. I also want to take advantage of the wet into wet experience we have been accumulating in our series and paint the snow wet into wet. -

After this layer dries I will be goin to work worth dry technoque and build up the snow laden trees.I spend some time with these tree - creating them with a small sabelette brush #6.

The water reflections are darker still and help to bring back the lightness to the surrounding snow - more wet into wet as I want soft edges