Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Watercolor Workshop




This week I am taking a workshop sponsored by the Utah Watercolor Society. The guest artist is Joyce Washor from New York. She does lovely miniature still life watercolors. The size of her paintings are about 3" x 4" and are just wonderful. You might think that painting that small would be easy to do, but it suprisingly has it's challenges. Anyone who does watercolors knows that it is often easy to over work a painting. A successful painting has a fresh look with glowing colors. Well needless to say I found myself overworking my little painting and on that small piece of watercolor paper, any mistake is much more obvious and harder to correct. I posted one of the exercises, it's of onions and grapes. It's not my best work, but at least you can see what we are doing.




It is a great workshop, and I am learning a lot. I especially like the palettes that Joyce is using of complimentary colors of red and green, blue and orange, and purple and yellow. On each palette there is 7 ranges of the primary color and its' complimentary color. We then made a color chart for each palettes and then on the chart blended the colors. It's hard to explain so I included a picture of the blue/orange palette. Anyway, this has been a great exercise for me. By using a limited palette like this you are able to create a painting where the colors harmonize with each other.


I have to thank Joyce, this has been a wonderful workshop! Plus it has been a wonderful time socializing with my talented artist friends.


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