Finding the Right Class

When I came back to the states after my vacation in Morocco, I started looking into classes that would help me with my watercolor project. I ended up finding a beginners class at the Creative Workshop at the Memorial Art Gallery. This class consists of 10 Thursdays and it's taught by Cynthia Iannaccone. With the help from Mrs. Elisa, I ended up getting a scholarship for this class which ended up covering all the fees for signing up. A big load off my shoulders! I've been to a couple classes so far and I'm liking the new techniques I'm learning. Here are a few of the pieces I've worked on so far.

To get really nice texture from watercolor, a very cool technique includes the use of salt. You can see how it turned out on the lower half of the paper above. To get this texture, I started off by painting on dry paper.While the paint was still wet, I sprinkled the salt on top. When my paper was completely dry, I wiped the salt away. On the piece above it, I used a splatter technique. After I finished painting the base which I started out on wet paper, I waited for it to dry a little. The reason for this was so the colors I added on top wouldn't bleed or blend into the background. There are a couple of ways to achieve the splatter affect. I've used the toothbrush method in the past with other paints and the splatter comes out much more fine but this time, Cynthia showed us how to do it using a paint brush. We used a tapping motion on the brush while it was above the paper by a few inches. The results were pretty nice.


We created collages from other pieces we made. This technique is great to use on colorful abstract pieces you don't necessarily love or if you just feel like it. I didn't love mine, especially the orange/yellow/red piece, but you can see how the pieces were transformed after putting them into a collage. The orange/red/yellow piece was painted on wet paper and the purple/blue/green was on dry. I also used different methods of painting for each one. For the top half, I used almost a dripping method where I just let the tip of the brush loaded with paint touch the wet paper. It was kind of an uncontrolled method where I just let the paint do its own thing. For the bottom half, I painted each stroke randomly using a dry brush. I got some texture on the orange and green from the salt.

BEFORE:

(Wet on Wet)

(Dry on Dry)

AFTER: