Lerri's Watercolor Classes

FALL 2012 WATERCOLOR CLASS – More Splattering

(Torrance the following will be what we will be doing in class this week. The drawing is on the picture page and the reference photo is in my Class Reference album if you are going to do the exercise.)

My whole purpose to the splatter projects is to make you less afraid to try something out of your comfort zone and see that you can make something wonderful.

This time I started with the drawing already on my paper so if I want to be a bit more selective on where I drop my paint, I will know where things are, then I wet the entire paper. I want the splatters to run and spread so my paper needs to be wet, the color I used to splatter or drip into the wet paper were very dilute so when they dried, they were just very pale suggestions of color. I noticed that some of you were having problems with this one, because your paper was too dry second, the paint you were trying to splatter didn’t have enough water with it. This is call “wet into wet” for a reason everything needs a lot of water to make it work.

While everything is still wet and running, you can tilt your paper in any direction you want. Notice that I didn’t tell you which colors to use, that is totally up to you, they just need to be very watery.

Now comes the hard part: Letting the paper dry completely. You can use a hair dryer if you want but let the paint do its things for a couple minutes before you drag out the dryer because it will stop all the subtle action that is going on, on your paper as paint and water mix so don’t get trigger happy with that dryer.

The other part of this lesson is contrast. Most of you are just so timid when it comes to getting really dark that your paintings look flat and lifeless. To make this poppy stand out from the background, you need to get dark. The darker you can get the negative space around the flower, the more that flower will stand out from the paper. Also note that I was using a variety of colors in my background. While it was predominantly green, I added colors like blue, purple, sienna, orange, yellow, red almost every color I have on my palette, this gives the background interest it creates soft shapes and suggestions of “stuff” happening around the poppy. Also note that I started with the leaves under painting them with a yellow wash and not really worrying about if I stayed in the lines or not. The background will be dark so what does it matter if I paint outside the lines?

Therest of the poppy I painted normally using blues and purples for the shadows, yellow and oranges for the center, this part you should be able to figure out by now.

Once the painting was as done as I could get it in class, I asked if anyone could see the splatters? There was a universal “Oh!” as people realized that you didn’t see the rainbow of colors that I started out with but a white poppy that seemed to glow. Is this the way you should paint all the time? That is a question only you can answer but you should keep it in your “bag of tricks” and pull it out every once in a while, it will make you happy.

Please have your own project for class next week, I will do demos as needed. See you in class.