Loosen Up Your Watercolor Painting—Here’s an Exercise to Try
Every time I lead a class or workshop, more than half of the participants mention the goal of “loosening up”. Here’s a skill-building exercise to help you move in that direction.
Every time I lead a class or workshop, more than half of the participants mention the goal of “loosening up”. Here’s a skill-building exercise to help you move in that direction.
Starting with a blank sheet of paper and just doing whatever “feels right” is way too little structure for most of us. This video gives you a step-by-step starting structure that you can improvise on top of to create a dragonfly of your own style.
Like most people, I did some rapid “pivoting” (otherwise known as “flailing”) during 2020. It’s time for me to get back to the core mission of my teaching: to help you be more successful using watercolor as an artist, that is, to use watercolor to explore your own thoughts, ideas and emotions, record your responses to the world, share your experiences with others, or express something personally meaningful. That means learning to plan your own paintings, but how?
One approach to designing and planning a painting of your own, using a holiday postcard as an example. Come plan along with me!
It can be helpful to think about style and voice as two pieces of your “creative identity” that come together to create the overall effect you want your paintings to have.
That pesky inner critic! I don’t know about you, but simply telling her to sit down and shut up doesn’t work for me. Oh, I can get her to leave me alone. It just doesn’t lead to paintings I’m happy with. I need my inner critic. We all need time to explore, experiment and follow…
This article is the third in a series. The preceding articles are: Is My Painting Done? Are You a “Photocopier”? There’s a Better Way In response to the last article, a reader made a couple of excellent points about why it’s sometimes difficult to deviate from a reference photo: lack of confidence, and the planning…
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