“Rockport Harbor, Windy, Cloudy, Sunny” 12 x16 watercolor on paper
Today was a great day with a wonderful group of enthusiastic painters, the rain had moved out and we had a fabulously fresh day with lots of wind and sun. It was just right for the lessons.
We started with a warm-up contour drawing, continuous line of graphite. The goal being to just get the character of the harbor down and to warm up the hand and eyes. We spent about 15 minutes on this exercise, it was not intended to result in a terrific drawing.
The next exercise was to divide the paper into 4 sections and then to create a fairly abstract passage of light across the paper trying to avoid the center. Then we used a variety of colors to try to achieve an expressive interpretation of the type of day we were looking at.
exercise demo, 18 x24 block arches rough
Second Demo “Sun on the side of red building” The is to really work on getting good brushwork and interesting shapes, while trying to achieve a strong feeling of light. I am not happy with the buildings they really aren’t very special but the trees work okay and the brushwork is pretty expressive.