Gilly Marklew watercolour artist and tutor: TEACHING NOTES FOR TUESDAY THE 3RD OF APRIL 2018

I'm very sorry everybody, but my camera is refusing to up/download any of the photo's of today's demonstration, and student work, but in short, we were adding detail to the negative spaces, whilst darkening down our still life and creating focal points by increasing areas of contrast between light and dark / and different colours
This example below shows a green wash for the foliage, and the leaves were picked out by painting in the dark spaces behind = negative shapes

Here is our still life for this week

We started out with simple foundation washes

And built up the detail by painting in the negative shapes.

This is my ( unfinished ) demonstration which I managed to scan, showing the negative space painting.

Here are some unfinished student paintings, note the tonal thumbnail sketches top right of each painting, this was to compose the objects within a frame, and pin down the tonal value of each object in relation to it's background, which makes for a better overall compositional balance.

look at the foliage on the cabbage below, this is a watercolour using the same technique at the tomato painting, top, we were using this technique to paint the foliage on the green sprouty veg, above.

Both classes started with a colour mixing exercise, with the beginners discovering what a wide range of of colours can be mixed by using 2 colours together, this gives us much more interesting greens, blues, pinks etc, and what colours to mix with which to get the colour you want, this is a much more interesting approach than painting onions in 1 red colour straight from the tube. ( the last colour is cadmium yellow by the way, I forgot to add the name. )
Both classes mixed all 6 colours together in a star shape by painting an asterix in a clear wash, putting a vey wet blob of each colour at outside edges, allow them to run into each other, then add extra pigment of 1st cad red, and perm rose, then with a free bias using more blue and yellow, then a blue bias using more blue.
I hope you will agree that the mixes in these star shapes are more interesting and beautiful that colours unmixed, or pre mixed in the pallet, when we allow the pigments to mix themselves on the paper without pushing them around too much, they do the most beautiful things.

The paintings below have a subtle variety of different colours in them despite you being in no doubt what colour the original objects are, and in fact when you look at most objects you should be able to see some variation in colour depending on reflected light, and it's up to us as artists to exaggerate these colours and even invent them at times.