LESSON PLANS SPRING TERM 2024 (2nd half) Lesson 3. Mixing our media - watercolour, line and white paint.

In this lesson I'm asking my students to think about the watercolour technique they were working with in the last lesson but then to add both line (as a way of seeing and defining the boundary between shapes) and white paint (as a way of correcting mistakes or re-finding lost light places). As ever, I'd really like people to experiment with the media they bring to this lesson.

Above are some lovely examples of watercolours with added line and/or gouache/white paint.

Spring Term 2nd half 2024 – Lesson 3. Watercolours, with the addition of line and/or white paint.

·         In the last lesson we were using watercolour both for its softer more ambiguous qualities alongside more decisive hard-edged shapes. In this lesson we’re adding more media to the mix, mostly line and white paint.

·         You can begin 1. In the same way you did last week, with a half wet page and some free painting OR 2. With line – a loose line drawing of your subject in which you allow your line to flow easily across the page and don’t lift your pen or pencil off the page as you draw.

·         If you’ve painted first, once the paint is dry, use your pen/pencil to further define your subject. Look for reasons to make lines – a line marks a boundary between two different areas so find areas which need a line to separate them.

·         If you worked first with line, now, with plenty of well-watered wash colours ready on your palette, fill your page with colour either within, or even flowing out of, the lines you’ve drawn.

·         Onto your now dried page, using white paint, find all the lightest places that you might have lost in the process of the painting so far and find them with your white paint. This is your chance to experiment with the mix of media.

Next Lesson: Charcoal landscape. Find a landscape image with good structure and contrasts. Bring charcoal, charcoal pencils, a good eraser and sketch books.