Thursday Art group - Session 10


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Watercolour 2

In this session we continued to work with watercolour and class were asked to bring glass or items with reflective surfaces.




 
Watercolour has been quite challenging for most in the group, due to its nature versus the need for the artists to control their imagery. Watercolour by nature offers fluidity and transparency, but can also permit detail and solidity. Class were encouraged to view reflection shapes and reflection patterns, rather than objects and to be freer in their application. Watercolour works best when it flows and blends, creating new colours, casts and glazes.
Stan - watercolour

Stan brought a brushed stainless steel coffee maker with a slightly reflective finish. After sketching the proportions, he carefully applied his watercolour, concentrating on the object more than the medium.

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After some discussion about being freer with the watercolour, he relaxed control and started to allow the medium to impose its nature over the object, giving some pleasing fluid effects.

Lorraine - Bottles Watercolour

Lorraine has embraced the use of watercolour over the last two sessions and her treatment of the glass reflects this. Initially, there was some tentative application of muted colours, but after some re-evaluation and bolder execution, the bottles began to come alive, expressing the qualities obtainable through floating pigment on water.

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Kathy - Snail glass watercolour

Kathy dedicated her time to experimenting with the spiral form of her glass snail. We discussed floating pigment on water, mixing pigment and then applying it in washes, dabbing water and pigment off the paper and then applying stronger pigment followed by water.

Rebecca was also present and used Kathy's other glass figure (shown above) as one of her subjects. However, she struggled to embrace the watercolour technique and preferred not to have her results shown on this occasion. One of the aims of the art class, is to offer a wide variety of mediums and techniques which can be applied to an individual's art and through this process, artists develop their preferences.

 Vee - Glass vase watercolour

Vee used a large glass vase as her main subject and initially applied her watercolour in a delicate and somewhat tentative way. By gradually building up layers of muted colour, greater depth and reflection started to appear. Looking at the image at the time of up-dating the website, I feel that the back inside area of the top right of the vase could benefit from a horizontal direction of brush strokes.




Tracy - watercolour glass ball

Tracy sketched the outlines of her objects in pencil, adding a bit more detail than she needed - so I suggested some light rubbing out before painting. Capturing the purple colour of the glass, with the pigments Tracy had available, proved to be difficult, but the qualities of reflected light within the glass, particularly in the base, began to work well.

When artists work regularly with certain subjects, for example, landscape, they will often buy ready-made pigment colours that are closer to the colours they need to produce consistently.



Techniques discussed

Loading brushes with more water.
Marking shapes in water before adding pigment.
Adding pigment before applying water.
Over-painting edge lines and then adding water within the line so that pigment would bleed into the inner areas.
Applying pigment washes and dabbing to remove excess.
Using water washes and dabbing, to remove excessive areas of pigment.


Suggestions and observations

Letting go of control - allowing water and pigment to flow freely.
Not being afraid to make 'mistakes'.
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