Taught my first class

This past week, I taught my first watercolour class at Da Artisti Studio. In four classes, we will be building foundational skills one on top of the other. These lessons cover fundamentals such as the types of tools you need, color mixing, value, volume, and composition. Once those have been covered, the course looks at a few specific techniques and approaches to make a painting.

In addition to explaining the various materials to participants, they had time to practice techniques for handling brushes and making marks. The classe concluded with a painting of a pear using one colour. The purpose was to focus on the importance of values.

Colour is beautiful, seductive, and often quite loud and attractive. According to neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone, the human brain actually has two separate processes for understanding value and understanding colour. When a color is very bright or intense, it disrupts the ability to see value.

It's key that painters have a solid knowledge of value before they begin to work with colour. That starts with seeing value in the things one wants to paint, which takes practice. Here are some steps artists can take in everyday life to work on your ability to perceive value:

• Pay attention to the subtlety of light and shadow that exists all around you. Pay attention to how dark one shadow is next to another.
• Pick a particular shadow and pay attention to its edge. Is it a sharp, crisp, clean edge, or is it fuzzy, blurry, and gradually getting lighter? 
• Pay attention to where lights are coming from. What part of an object is closest to the light source? 
• Pay attention to the shape of highlights reflected on an object. Can you tell which light source they are reflecting?

Another way to see values is to take a picture of something and then desaturate it, changing it to more black and white. This will allow you to instantly see the value differences.

Here is a small painting I completed recently. A while ago I purchased some Daniel Smith metallic colours. This was my first experiment with them.

Door Knobs - 11" X 16"

Have a great week

Danielle