Thursday 14 June 2012

This week's watercolour classes

I have translated the Drawing class exercise ( previous post ) to the watercolour classes also.
My watercolour class Learners were faced with the added challenge of measuring tone within colour, and also gauging intense to neutral colours.
The object of this exercise is to equip learners with mixing techiniques to represent a range of tone, intensity and neutrality accurately, and to know how keep each wash relevant to the whole picture.

1st---this is what the learners were aiming for, not a finished painting, but an exercise in translating tone and colour from a photocopy without any detail.
The right hand side was the stuck down photocopy, and the left, painted in simple strips so that the join in the middle would dissapear as much as possible by use of correct colour and tone only.

We started in the same way as the drawing class, by measuring accurate proportions, sticking half the photocopy down, and drawing in the rest.

Measuring proportions

Below is a colour and tone exercise strip, essential for all, but even for more experienced, this is a good warming up exercise.
In this case viridian was gradated from very pale to V. intense, then neutralized at the bottom with burnt umber to lose it's intensity, this is useful when representing the density of foliage in shadow, the greens losing their intensity without sunlight on them.
  neutralizing  a colour works by applying the opposite colour on a colour wheel.

Again I asked my learners to paint the scene upside down so they could concentrate on colour and tone, and not be distracted by detail which might throw them off course.
1/2 hr before the end of the lesson, we had a group discussion to compare notes on how we got on, and how we could best proceed.

When one half was finished, I asked L's to finish the exercise at home, by removing the photocopy from the watercolour paper, and completing the other side to match the one already done.
I'll post the results next week.


No comments:

Post a Comment