Category: Watercolor courses

Sky Studies

One of Two-Wet on Wet vs Wet on Dry

This week I spent some time working on sky studies. Clouds and sunsets, colors and techniques to improve my landscapes.

Prompted by World Watercolor Month for clouds last week, I decided to spend more time getting to know skies a bit more. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time up there and I certainly have seen some beautiful skies.

Two of two Wet-on-Dry

Steve Mitchell, The Mind of Watercolor, had a good tutorial on clouds the other day working in both wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. As you can see in these to photographs each has its own merits depending upon the affect I’m trying to achieve. Naturally I didn’t want to waste the paint and time so what do we to with two cloud/sky studies? We add a landscape of course!

Continue reading Sky Studies

Quantity-Quality-Or Both

Photo and work in progress

Is quantity, quality, or is both that are important when it comes to learning to paint with watercolor or sketch with pen & ink?

Learning a craft is much like playing a sport—to get good at it, one must practice, practice, and practice some more. Sports legends like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Tiger Woods spent hours, days, and years practicing their sport to get to the level they have all achieved. Continue reading Quantity-Quality-Or Both

Painting with Kateri

The first art “lesson” I purchased was through The Great Courses program. Taught by Kateri Ewing, her course gave me a good foundation on color, value, and techniques for learning to paint with what many believe to be one of the toughest art mediums—watercolor.

A fun thing she does in the class is show several ways to add “texture” to watercolor paintings. In this case she had us swab several colors on paper then sprinkle table salt and water on the collective colors. Continue reading Painting with Kateri