2nd Session beginners

Some of you were wondering if for any reasons our workshop has stopped, and I did realize that due to my job and other life issues I have quite some time to post anything about how we are doing.
We did not stop, we are meeting as scheduled, every Friday with the beginner group and every second Friday with the advanced group. Just that I didn't manage to take photos at every session, but I will try to catch up with the blog posts during the following days.
As the lessons are following a similar pattern as the previous year, it is not really needed to explain much about what we do, but just a very short note: monochrome color study, graded washes and value study. Our first little painting was again a seascape study. Here are a few snapshots with the ladies in action.

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.

Sessions #21 & #22 - the big wave!

As summer approaches we are already dreaming of the great time on the seaside. For now, just walking on the beach and enjoying the sound of the rather big waves as they are breaking and mixing with the sand. And furthermore we are having fun with trying to translate this image into watercolor paintings.
As far as technique is concerned, we are working with wet-in-wet in the sky area (yellow ochre,crimson lake and cobalt blue) , we are learning to use masking fluid to save the whites of the paper to make the waves and foam, and color mixing (viridian and cobalt blue) to get the Mediterranean sea water colors. Work in progress so far, and only a few photos this time.

October 31, 2014 - 3rd Workshop session

Today I had some more time to look immediately after at the photos, and to share them with you. We did practice the graded washes, wet-in-wet color mixing, and a bit of dry to dry with a small little painting of a imaginary seascape. We started with a bit of practice to get a small boat shape done in the sketchbooks, and then used only Cobalt Blue and Ivory Black to do our small paintings, as you can see bellow.

This was our group today:

Practice sketching:

Adding colors:

Showing how we put a flat wash on paper:

Wonderful works from the ladies:

The Community Center president, Mr. George Kolokithas, visiting our workshop:

More progress with our paintings:

By the end of the session, I am sure you cannot say which one is done by me and which one by one of the ladies:

And the most important of all, we are having lots of fun:

Next week: primary, secondary and tertiary colors; making a color wheel; first steps towards watercolor glazing.