WORKSHOP, SUNDAY 16TH FEBRURY 2025 - Watercolour technique and process.

We'll be using large fragments of magazine image to practice our watercolour technique. The magazine scraps become the colours, tones and shapes we expand on to create the practice pieces. It'll be a lovely free-ing workshop with no pressure to create 'a watercolour' but with plenty of time to practice layering and revealing light places.

Watercolour process and techniques, workshop, Pimperne, Sunday 16th February, 10am – 4pm.

First...

You’ll need watercolours, brushes and watercolour paper, a colourful magazine and a glue stick (I’ll have some!)

·         Find a magazine image and cut a large fragment from it.

·         Stick the image into the middle of your page .

·        Don’t worry about continuing the image as it appears in the magazine – continue the image outward from the image.

·         In the first image you can see that as I’ve worked my way out from the image, I have looked for the palest underlying colours and for the lightest places which will remain un-painted.

·         I’ve continued the image as I imagine it to be by using the clues from the image itself.

·         When this layer is dry I can do two things 1. ‘paint in’ anything which is dark against light and 2. Find some lighter shapes to be ‘revealed’.

·         Because these first pieces will be exercises rather than finished pieces, it frees you not to have to produce something ‘presentable’. Instead, you are following the watercolour process to see how it can work. For that reason, free yourself to the experiment.

·         Once your first wash has dried and you’ve ‘painted-in’ some dark places and ‘revealed’ some light places, now think about matching the colours and tones of your magazine fragment.

·         Colours can be defined by the main colours i.e. red, yellow, blue etc., and then by how much they differ from their classification for instance – yellow but a dull yellow. How might you make a bright yellow more dull?

·         Tones are a bit more complex – a tone can be defined as light or dark (or anything in-between) but much more useful for us is to understand the tones of two things next to each other…is one ting darker than the other? If so, you know where you’re building the ‘greater’ tone. You’ll know which side of an edge is darker and therefore which is lighter.

·         With each layer (maybe only one or two more) decide what shapes can be ‘revealed’ by being lighter and which can be ‘painted-in’ by being darker.

·         Gradually increase the tone with darker colours to match the tones of the magazine fragment.

·         Try the same experiment with several different fragments of magazine image.

·         In the afternoon, find a bigger image that you can complete or fill one page with many fragments and join them up intuitively, using your best watercolour technique!

·         Enjoy playing with the images and the layering technique.

Next workshop: 23rd March.