Three Paintings In Three Days

Poppies 11x11Iris 15x22Calla Lilies 15x15

I have been a very busy painter this week. I had a three day workshop with Karlyn Holman. You have to be a fast painter to keep up with her program. She has lots of ideas and the learning is on a pretty steep curve. To make things move along quickly she provides the drawing so that you can get to the fun part of painting and collage. Everyone had their choice of flower subject but the process was the same in each lesson. The Calla Lilly lesson was to paint an interesting background with different width of vertical stripes while still having a dominant color direct the eye through the painting. In this case it was the red. After the background was in the subject was painted.

The second painting was the Iris. The background was also painted first in bright colors with collage papers added to the wet paint. Some stenciling was done while the paper was wet. The stencil was placed on the paper and watercolor pencil was sanded over it to create the colored area. After drying the collage papers were glued and allowed to dry again. Then the rectangle behind the iris was drawn and painted. When this was dry the iris were painted alternating light and dark.

The third painting was the Poppy painting. The object of this lesson was to create a path of light behind the subject. You made a plan of how you wanted to accomplish this and then you followed the same steps as the previous paintings; paint, collage papers, stenciling, drying, gluing, then painting the subject. It's fun to come home from a workshop with 3 paintings that are mostly completed. Now that I'm looking at them after a couple of days I can see some areas where I could adjust some of the colors. With watercolors it's amazing what you can correct, but that's a secret. Most people think you can't correct watercolors so "shhhhh" it just between us.