Beginners' Group: Progress on the Roses painting

In our last session we looked a bit at the drawings, correcting a few things here and there, and then moved to the first wash of the background and working on the greens. We are going to finish them next week.

1st Watercolor Workshop Session, both beginners and advanced groups

Today we started the Watercolor Workshop for Seniors, both beginners and advanced groups, at the Community Center (2nd ΚΑΠΗ) of Patras city. This was our second meeting for the new "academic" year (2015-2016), as we met previous week to establish some of the administrative issues and get to know each other and our expectations. The beginners group has now already 7 attendants, although we were supposed to start only with 5. And we are waiting for one more to come next week. This makes it more difficult to come around with the materials coverage, but I am confident we will manage. As for the advanced group, I am very happy to say that all 7 ladies that followed the courses previous year joined me again this year! This makes me believe that I did something right previous year, and their excitement and joy to start again means a lot to me. In the advanced group we have one more lady, who is actually following also the beginners lessons, as she has already some drawing and acrylics experience. But she needs to catch up with the basics on watercolors.
So, what we did today?
Beginners: introduction to the watercolor media, materials needed, properties of the watercolor paints, first steps to handle the medium and the brush and paper. We did a small study of color intensity with 5 steps and a "flat wash" to get used to how the color reacts on paper. And that was pretty much what we covered within the one hour of lesson. I hope the next session, with an actual little painting (a seascape study) will be more exciting for the group.
Advanced: a fast pass through the basic watercolor techniques (color value, flat wash, graded wash, dry-on-dry, wet-on-wet, masking fluid, mixing colors on paper); a bit of composition theory and discussion about what a "reference photo" means and how we use it; selection of the photo and a pencil study on the composition; drawing on the transfer paper and transfer of the drawing to the watercolor paper. For the first painting of this year we actually had two reference photos to chose from, one with tomatoes and one with figs.
That would be the update of today, and unfortunately no photos. Next time I hope I get the camera with me.

Session #20 - the red pepper

Next object of our studies is a big red pepper, which seems to give headaches to the ladies to correctly get the three-dimensional shape translated into a good 2-dimensional drawing. A very good exercise, and wonderful paintings in the end (most of them not finished yet, to show them to you in the next post I guess). But we keep having fun, and the ladies dedicate more and more time at home to study watercolor - either painting or read about. I have a collection of Watercolor magazine (I used to have a subscription for many years) and the ladies get one of them each week to have a look at what professional watercolorists do. Most of them do not understand English, but still just looking at the pictures get them exposed to watercolor and various techniques, and makes them start wandering about how one or the other could be done, what colors should I use, etc.

And the surprise at this session was that we had 2 new-comers, that wanted to get a taste of our workshops and already register for the next year beginners workshop!
This alerted me about starting to prepare for the next year beginners workshop! We need, again, to look for some funding schema for our materials. Although it looks like this year we will get some materials through the Community Center (not sure what exactly yet), the needs of a new group are quite high and for sure we will need some help.
As far as I am concerned, I have already decided that I will keep do the workshop on the volunteer basis, and we will keep two groups in 2015-2016, the beginners and the advanced ones.

Session #19 - Pears

Pears and apples are of the most studied fruits by the artists: at some point in our learning path we all meet them! And again, every single painting is different. Difference is something that I encourage our group to aim for: after a few common ground directions about how to correctly draw the objects, about how to attempt paint the cloth behind the fruits and how to lay the washes to keep the light, I propose each lady to work with different colors, to find her own path. And, as you can see from the samples bellow, each painting in the end is a wonderful surprise - I am sure you would love to have them hangging on your walls (their children and grandchildren have started to ask them for custom orders!)!