How’s that for a few Ws or so?
This past weekend I spent immersed in painting and drawing and sketching, all focused on watercolor. This lucky girl got in after being waitlisted to a workshop with Brenda Swenson, an excellent watercolorist, and as it turns out, a very good teacher. Three days of organized to increasingly looser structure was perfect.
Day 1 began with continuous contour line drawing and lost edges. At first I got it – and then didn’t – and then did again. These drawings then led to watercolors using lost edges to blur and bleed color into color – wet working with deliberate movement of color. This helps with reflected light. The mind fills in what the brush does not.
From there, on the second day, we moved into landscapes from photographs, all of which were provided by Brenda, and from which all the landscapes in this post are derived from. For some reason I couldn’t seem to think straight – I was restless and goofy and my mind was all over the place. Somehow, I managed to survive and produce a few pictures of value. The still lives I did sucked. Structure of the day, if I recall, along with the first was draw, format, paint. Formatting was finding a border for the image, where edges might break out of the line, and give an interesting look to the painting. Good graphics!
And on the third day, structure loosened. The focus was on painting vignettes. A vignette, I knew, had white around the borders of a painting – a piece of a painting. Brenda put it into a different perspective, on which I never had heard of – cruciform. Don’t touch the corners with paint, touch one or all of the 4 edges of the picture’s ostensible borders, and focus on how the shape – the negative space of the corners – looks in relationship to all the other.
Lessons each day, thoughts for each day. If I get another chance to attend here workshop, I will – if you get a chance, do it!
Now, a few things done during the workshop . . . click on a picture to see them bigger!
Ink, Yarn & Beer 