MAY WORKSHOP - FLOWERS

As this months workshop coincided with one of our many Bank Holiday weekends in England, we werent expecting many to come so the ladies who were planning to attend asked if we could do flowers . Right up my street. Before leaving home I walked round the garden and collected a selection of leaves and flowers to go with a bunch of yellow lilies I had bought when shopping on Friday. So I'll post a few examples of work that went on during the day.
As our previous workshops had been basically on drawing skills, we needed to spend most of the morning learning more about watercolour techniques. These colour squares were the first exercise to show how colours re-acted layed on top of each other on the page rather than mixing the three primaries they chose in the palette which creates a neutral. It was a great exercise in colour mixing using the three chosen primaries layered in different order.
We then moved onto putting these skills into practice with selected leaves. First they tried wet on wet and then added detail once dried. Then tried various other ways to interpret the leaf.


Before breaking for lunch we had some playschool fun by wetting a full sheet of watercolour and dropping in three chosen colours, splattering and tipping, then adding salt. They were left to dry during our break with the idea of looking for floral and leaf shapes in the blended colours and painting negatively around them. But it never happened as they were all keen to get on with a full flower study - so that became their 'homework'!

I only took photos of the drawing stage, as we all got so involved and committed to preparing the correct colours for the layers and searching for the various tones. .. I forgot to photo the finished pieces. Sorry. I think they went home realising that floral painting is not so easy - a genre all its own and much to be admired.