LESSON PLANS SPRING TERM 2023: Lesson 5, loose watercolour, flowers in a jam jar part 2!

In this lesson I'm asking my students to repeat the watercolour process they used in the last session but this time they have the added advantage of using soft pastel or pastel pencils at the end to 'find' any lost light places. Once again we're talking about re-negotiation of a work...very important notion! Above, you can see a watercolour re-negotiated at the end with pastels and pastel pencils.

Spring Term 2023 lesson 5 Loose Watercolour with added soft pastel: Flowers in a jam jar.

· Just to re-iterate, you can’t paint a light place, you can only reveal it! Your white is the white of your page. If you need a pale colour, add water to it so that, when placed on the page, more of the white paper shines through.

· If you want to reveal a pale yellow daffodil, paint a watered down yellow blob (technical term!) onto your page in the area where the daffodil will be. Once it’s dry, reveal the daffodil by painting a darker colour around it. You’ll be left with the yellow daffodil.

· We’re going to begin in the same way as last session. Place a small bunch of flowers in a clean jam jar. Using a light colour, paint to reveal the light shapes in or around the jar. Link up that wash of paint around the light places so that you’re left with some light shapes within and area of paint.

· Using your biggest brush, extend that wash of colour up to the top of the page making sure it’s very wet.

· Paint like a happy 5yr old into that wash above the jam jar area. Drop evidence of all the colours you see into that wash and let the colours run together and do what they will.

· Before the jar dries, paint the stems and if they run together that’s fine.

· Gradually, as your work dries, the paint you put down runs less or doesn’t run at all. This means you can paint shapes are areas that stay where you put them. Look for shapes around a light place (dark around a light leaf) and darker shape you can paint (rather than reveal).

· Paint loosely today, without fear of ‘making mistakes’ because at the end you can add soft pastels (or pastel pencils) to re-find any light places you might have lost. You can add water to the soft pastels once applied to the page. This softens them if required.

· This a session of experimentation! No rights or wrongs!

Next lesson after a one-week Easter break: Landscape! We’re going to draw with soft pencils. We’re going to study a landscape image and break it into simpler structures and shapes. You’ll need (if possible) a landscape image/photo and your pencils, good eraser and cartridge paper.