It is my great pleasure to collect flowers from my garden to give my students to paint. I choose subjects according to colour, form, textures, scale and variety on a week to week basis as opposed to 'flowers' or 'portraits', so this basket of Camelia flowers fit the bill nicely for a restricted watercolour painting, with no drawing at all.
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| Basket of flowers straight from the garden |
While the camelia was the main event, I decided it would be good to warm up with something simpler, with less complicated shapes to get the brushes flowing and relieve any potential anxiety amongst students.
So we started with a stem of Forest Flame, which has similar colours. Students were then restricted to using only Lemon Yellow, as a base colour, and Alizarin Crimson and Permanent Rose.
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| By student, Brigid |
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| Brigid's lovely camelia |
The most important thing to remember when going straight to paint is to resist the temptation to use the brush as if it were a pencil to provide an 'outline'. The great advantage of NOT drawing an outline in pencil is that we are looking at the entire shape from the offset, as a mass. A line won't do this but a blob of paint pushed over the surface quickly provides the shape we need.
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| Trevor starting his Forest Flame 'warm up' |
It is a very relaxing way to work and uses watercolour at its best.
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| Concentrating! |
Some students (above) added a background towards the end.
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| By student Sara C |
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| By student Jessica |
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| Studying hard! |
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| Trevor's Camelia |
Upcoming workshops: oil painting, portrait drawing and children's art!
For information email julie@juliedouglas.co.uk
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