This week we focused on one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of watercolor: knowing how to finish a painting. Throughout this course, we've learned how watercolor is built in layers. We've practiced soft skies, values, layering, texture, and depth. This week was about bringing all of those skills together and adding the final touches that help a painting feel complete. One of the main ways we finished our landscapes was by adding contrast. Contrast helps guide the viewer's eye and...

This week we focused on layering and texture and spent time exploring how watercolor can create depth in soft and natural ways. Rather than adding detail all at once, we practiced slowly building our paintings layer by layer. Our first technique focus was layering. We practiced this by painting clusters of pine trees in multiple passes. For the first layer, we used a very diluted “tea” consistency of paint. This layer was light, watery, and transparent. We grouped our pine trees closely...

This week we began moving from softness and flow into a little more structure and intention. We focused on value, brush control, shape, and wet-on-dry painting techniques while continuing to build confidence with watercolor. One of our biggest focuses this week was understanding value. In watercolor, value refers to how light or dark a color appears. We used a very diluted tea like paint and slowly built darker values by adding additional layers over the top. To practice this, we painted...