“Intro to Watercolors” First Class Meeting

Good morning!

Last night we had our first of three classes for my latest offering through Mount Wachusett Community College.

It’s always so exciting and anticipation filled when new students arrive and meet me and the rest of the class. It’s very exciting to me to have new people walk through my studio doors, learn about them and watch them learn and create.

For our first class, we worked on watercolor techniques using swatches and household items (such as rubbing alcohol, salt, bubble wrap and paper clips. It sure seemed like the students got a kick out of seeing if the techniques worked, how to change their paint to water ratio and what you get as a final result. Swatching like this is a favorite thing to do for me because I use these swatches in other pieces of art work. Cutting them up, doodling on them and adding them to a painting or card gives them a great use and also keeps me creating using pieces of my own work. I love doing this! Maybe that’s why there are so many little painted bits of paper around my studio!

Once we were done with our technique swatches, we moved on to create a painting using a few of these techniques. Learning how to draw using a single line (not picking up the pen as we draw out our image) to create a botanical piece, filling each of the segments with 2 choice colors and then using the alcohol and salt to create gorgeous texture really made these students shine! They picked it up so quickly, I was impressed! And their final pieces were gorgeous!

Next week we’ll work on simple landscapes for miniature masterpieces. Looking forward to that already!