artsybloggy » Watercolour Course

30 Rock (minus 25)

kayhmk — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 01:23:25 +0000

Inspired by last session with the still-lifes, this week everybody was assigned a task of selecting one object and doing study(s) of it. As a back-story we heard that sometimes (in art schools) you have to do even hundreds of these.

Beacause I’m a highly peculiar person, I got terribly excited.

So I picked a rock.

Of which I planned to make 30 studies.

You can pretty much guess what happened.

These are all of the same rock we had to paint last time in the still-life. Different angles, obviously.The large one I did on another session, on purpose, for I had my frustration threshold sufficiently broken. Lord a small thing can be difficult!

On the side I started a white seashell, but that one I’ll show you when we get to the session on which I finished it.

Why I Don’t Do Still-Lifes, Reason No. 1

kayhmk — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:11:28 +0000

It has been said that behind every successful painting there’s a winning still-life. Well, this posting should explain a lot when it comes to my painting career…

This second watercolour painting lesson the assignment was to paint a fairly complex still-life (= several objects of different qualities). Because I had no real plans as to what I wanted to do (and the crow I drooled over the first time seemed too difficult to attempt), I did as I was told.

I must say that it’s rare experience to feel as desperate as I did this time. I hate green and of course the still-life was full of it. I liked the vibrancy of the colours but I couldn’t translate that on the paper. I fully screwed up the base washes. Small things like that.

Also I was very annoyed at myself. WHY do I have to draw with brushes, why? Maybe I do have brushes that are too small (and following this logic I since went and spent over 100 euros on watercolour brushes on one go).

Well, you can’t hit it every time. Not even the every tenth you wish with watercolours. I’m a long way off from professional.

Watercolour and pain, WF #2

kayhmk — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:35:38 +0000

Phew, this week has gone in a blink of an eye. I can’t fathom how that keeps happening, but there you go. Though, as per the headline, this week’s been bad health-wise so I haven’t had the inclination to sit down and do any kind of art whatsoever.

But on with the show!

This week, on Sunday, was the first meeting of the watercolour course. I was a bit nervous about my skill level but the course seemed alright. I hope I’ll get better as I got some practice under my belt.

I was a bit ambitious and started with painting a pheasant. It was calling me with its bright purple chest during the intro, so really no choice.

(The picture quality is truly horrible and doesn’t really give out the best impression. I have to take a better one later. But in the meantime, enlarge the painting for it to make even the slightest bit of sense.)

I really didn’t pay much attention to the scale so the head is extremely small compared to the body. Mostly on purpose, seriously.

Well, that’s about that. The other thing I got finished is an age-old Arabian painting. I actually thought I had uploaded it to my blog already, but since I hadn’t, and I did some small tweaks to it, I think it is a nice way to bulk up my “This Week’s Finished” posting.

Next week I hope to post several of those “nearly finished” pieces I have lying around.