Week 6:

What else to explore when drawing with a brush:

• Underpainting
  • How much you paint vs how much white paper is left
  • Large areas of color or small spots?
  • Variety of colors or a minimal palette?
  • Color harmony
• Outline
  • The color of your outline
  • Continuous outline or broken into smaller segments?
  • One color or multiple?
  • Add texture?

Week 5:

What else to explore when throwing petals (optical color mixing):

• Colors
  • Primaries or the full spectrum of colors
    • If primaries, try changing out your reds, yellows, and blues to change your color harmony
• Brushes
  • Fan versus flat versus calligraphy versus round, etc
• Brushstrokes
  • Large areas versus small dots versus organic shapes, etc
• Time
  • Fast or slow
• How many layers you use

What else can you explore?

Week 4:

Techniques for reserving the white:

1. ‍Reserving the White. Reserve the white areas that you want to remain pure white by painting around them. This works for expressing white-colored objects or surfaces, and for expressing the light on illuminated surfaces.‍
2. Lifting. Bring back the white color of paper by means of the lifting technique. Those areas will be slightly off-white.‍
3. Masking fluid. Use masking fluid to cover the places of the highest value (lightest areas), before starting to paint.‍
4. Resist method. Use a white crayon or a white wax candle to keep specific areas from getting painted over. The white crayon is not removed at the end and remains on your painting.‍
5. White outline. Leave some white outline around objects, to prevent pigments run into each other.‍
6. Sparkle. Let white spaces naturally happen between your brushstrokes. It is OK to keep those white specks in the finished painting.
7. ‍Leaving a Promise. If you leave your painting unfinished, the areas of unpainted white paper may look meaningful.

Week 3:

Continue painting on your tonal paper. Think strategically and thoughtfully about how you'll allow the color of the paper to remain in your piece. Your internal critic will try to tell you that so much brown, untouched paper will mean unfinished - but that's not necessarily true if you're using the brown in specific areas that coincide with the photo reference.

Figure out how to use it as a shortcut, figure out how to do less without losing the quality, three-dimensionality, and substance of the still life.

If you finish early and you don't feel comfortable with working on toned paper OR if you felt you painted over too much of the brown, do it again!

Week 2:

The best way to learn how to paint with watercolors is practice. Continue practicing the wet into wet technique. For your second (or third) piece, try painting quickly (20 minutes or less.) Set a timer. This will really help you let go of perfectionism and being attached to the outcome; instead, you'll experience freedom in your artwork which will allow you to enjoy the painting process even more. Because if you don't like the piece you worked on, all you have to do is grab a new piece of paper!

How to prepare for week 3:

Tone a piece of watercolor paper with mid-tone brown watercolors. Make your entire paper the same brown. Your background needs to be dry before class starts. If you paint your entire paper without stretching your watercolor paper first, it will curl and cockle. The article is linked on this page with step by step instructions.

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