Workshop session #26 - forest started to show

In this session we developed the background wash, with wet-on-wet painting of circular greens, achieved by color variation from yellow to blue at the sides of the paper. When the paper started to dry (not completely) we used the sponge to work on the first layer of foliage and then we had to stop as the paper needs to dry now completely before moving to the next step. Just a couple of photos taken at the end of the session.

The big news of the day: by the end of July we will have a small exhibition with the works of the workshop attendants! The 3 branches of the Community Center are organizing an event to celebrate the completion of the various seminars and activities conducted from September 2014 until June 2015, and we were asked to organize an exhibition with our achievements. Although it is exciting for all of us, there is also quite a lot of work ahead of us!

Workshop session #25 - reference photo selection and composition

Most of the artists working from reference photos indoor to create their paintings use more than one photo to build-up the best composition to convey their message. How to combine the photos, which are the essential elements of each scene, or just how to make abstraction of the annoying details are skills to be learned by every emerging artist and require lots of experiments and hands on studies to master it.
For this session I saved quite a few reference photos from the Reference Images Library of WetCanvas (www.wetcanvas.com), depicting woodlands with old trees and foliage. We are going to further experiment foliage and texture with the natural sea sponge, moving from the single tree to a forest setup. Each lady selected the photos she likes best and had to draw a composition out of them. It was a bit difficult because we only had my laptop to browse the photos, but we did manage to get it done.

 The next step was to transfer the drawing to the watercolor paper, and during the next session we are going to experiment again with the sponge.

And I managed to take photos of some of the paintings done by the ladies during the previous two sessions (not all of them, but quite a few), which I hope you will enjoy.

Session 24 - Making foliage with a sponge

For today we moved on to a new technique, involving the use of a natural sea sponge to make the foliage of a cherry tree in bloom. The ladies at the workshop were so impressed about how easy is to make the foliage look so natural and so beautiful at the same time with the right colors and just a few movements. Of course, it takes some time and quite a few experiments to learn to handle the sponge, and there are also some variations in the sponges which gives different results. We are still experimenting, and I am looking forward for the finished works, as we only managed to get the first few layers of paint done during the workshop after demonstrating the technique and a few experiments on a trial paper.