There is always something to do when you are an artist and teacher. I had an email last Thursday from a past student wanting to know if I could fit her in for a lesson on Saturday. Of course, I agreed!
Theresa wanted to do flowers and had some of her own wonderful photos as references. She had two major concerns: backgrounds and portraying the delicacy of flowers.
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| #1012 - Bloom & Bud - 5 x 7 watercolour |
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I used the leaves to show wet-in-wet blending followed by liner brush work. For the petals we used a wet-on-dry technique with damp brush blending. The background was straight wet-in-wet using a variety of very strong colours blended on the paper, painting carefully around the flower. And finally, I demonstrated lifting out colour from the background and adding a few more leaves and the bud to help balance the composition. There isn't time in a two hour class to do a complete painting so I jump around from subject to subject so the student has had instruction on every element. We work on a few leaves, a few petals, a bit of background and lifting and then the student can (hopefully) complete the painting at home.
Bloom & Bud started off just as a demonstration on a old spotted piece of watercolour paper. In spite of the jumping around, I could see that my demonstration piece was looking pretty good so I cleaned off the few spots that showed on the petals and completed the painting.
To top of the weekend, I got a surprise. A few weeks ago, my friend Sheila was doing a give-away on her blog (
Sheila's Blog) of some niftily textured foam. That is what I picked up at the post office on Sunday.
The timing was perfect as I had just started work on a quilled dolphin and wasn't sure how I would finish the card but one of the textured foams was perfect. I will probably be playing with these foam pieces for some time.
And finally, here are a couple of photos of winter in the valley. Today started off with 6 more inches of snow, grey skies and a 20 minute blizzard but by 11:00 the sun was shining in a vibrant blue sky.
Hmm, I got more cloud that I thought. Some day I should paint some winter scenes of the valley but for now, I would rather think Spring and paint flowers.
