Water Color Painting Class #4- A Study in Strawberries...

We learned a totally new technique of water coloring this class.  It was wet on wet.  I also got to finally break open and use my new bottle of masking fluid.  Oh boy! Oh boy!  Now we're having fun!

First we sat in front of the computer and discussed the 5 varies of shading to make something appear 3 dimensional on paper.  I must have picked up more in the University of Utah open draw than what I thought.  All of my years of pencil drawing were paying off.

Then, we were drawing a strawberry from a black & white photo on the rough side of the water color paper.  Then it was fun with masking fluid.  I got to break open the new package on this one.  It was a mini version of Christmas.  I finally get to play with and figure out what this masking fluid was used for.  Yahoo!  Colleen, the teacher told us to just lightly put/ poke the paper to make some strawberry seeds on the dark side of the strawberry; about 5 seeds would do.  Don't over do it; she told us.

(Photo- my monochromatic strawberry study.)

We turned the drawn and masked drawing face down on our boards.  We took water filled sponges and squeeze water out on to the paper.  More and more water; we squeezed onto the paper.  Pushing the water with the sponge into the back of the paper.  Then, we flipped the paper over.  More water was squeezed on to the front of the paper.  This side we needed to be careful not to disturb the drawing or the masking.  We carefully dabbed more and more water into the paper.  The goal was to raise the paper off the board and have it sag easily in you hand.  Once that occurred, then we started to sop up all the water off our boards and all of the excess water off of the paper.  Then with a rolled up dry tea towel, we rolled it across over the paper on both sides trying to get all of the excess water out.  It seemed a little counter to what we had done.

Once that was done then we chose one color and did the strawberry in a monochromatic form.  The idea here is that we first need to figure out how to make it three dimensional then we can do it in color once we discover where our darker and lighter values were.  I decided to use a mix between paines gray and ultra marine blue.

( Photo- My colored study of the strawberry.)

Next, we did it in color.  I played with all kinds of color in the background but kept to mainly strawberry like colors for the actual colored strawberry.  Yeah, it might have been a little boring of me.  One of the gals in the class did a wonderful dual colored strawberry with a cool red and a wonderful warm burnt sienna.  It was wonderful!  Another gal did a red with shades of purple that turned out quite nice too.