Weekly watercolor thread
4mo
Gannon Beck
I wish I could commit to painting in watercolor daily, but I think that's a bit unrealistic. Nevertheless, I want to paint more and I am starting this thread with the intent of posting to it at least once a week with watercolor paintings and sketches.
Here are a few of my recent efforts. The first two floral paintings were demos I followed out of Julie Pollard's book, "Watercolor Unleashed", and the last two were studies done from the same photograph.
This is a community thread, so let's exert some positive peer pressure on each other and sling some paint!
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1d
Here's one from a watercolor workshop lead by Jared Cullum this weekend. He's a great teacher, awesome youtube videos on both watercolor and gouache!
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1d
Incredible work!
This is fantastic. Wonderful work.
I second the assessment of Jared Cullum. That dude is a national treasure. It's rare to find someone who can both do art at a high level and explain it. Not only can he do that, he is great on giving insights on how to practice for the long-term. For instance, the reason I'm doing master studies at a smaller size is because of Jared. You'll see a lot of these smaller studies coming out of me in the upcoming weeks, and it's all thanks to a push in the right direction from Jared.
Coincidentally, I signed up for his Patreon this weekend. For $10 a month, I'm getting access to a treasure trove of information. This weekend, I'm going to go through his tutorial on painting skies in watercolor. There is so much there.
I've taken one workshop from him and will take more in the future. I want to spend time going through a lot of his videos so that when I have him on video call I have good questions.
Awesome studies! Good to see that you finally did the Sargent study and what a great job you have done! The florals are phenomenal. You have handled so many colors so gracefully! Julia would be very happy:)
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5d
Inspiring work, as always!! The gators are fantastic, strong negative shapes, great sense of light. The color transitions in the flowers are beautiful.
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5d
Beautiful!
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14d
An attempt at a Trevor Chamberlain study from this weekend. Tried to go straight in with paint, no underdrawing so it veers off a bit from the actual piece but this was one of the first times I kinda saw the process in my head before putting brush to paper. Started using Andy Evansen's method of working back and forth between a value study and the finished piece simultaneously to plan the composition and washes in steps which helped keep me focused on the piece while waiting for washes to dry. And I got a little plein air time in with a quick palm tree/sky sketch from the back yard
This is fantastic. You are really doing great with your painting studies.
Looking up Andy Evansen now!
Wow! Your study is phenomenal. I just checked out the artist. He is awesome!
The palm trees of your plein air study are also so fluid. I always struggle doing palm trees, getting bogged down by the details is easy.
Took a leap of faith and did some plein air watercolor painting today. Whenever I try to draw vegetation from a photo, I find it very hard to simplify the noise and vary colors to create interest. This one is the most satisfactory one till date, though I was on the verge of ruining it by overworking the details.
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22d
Excellent work!! You captured the mountains beautifully!
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22d
Love these colors! The rusty blue pickup is fantastic. Are you finishing with ink on top of the watercolor here, or doing an ink drawing and painting over the line work?
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23d
These are cool
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30d
Took the watercolors out for a walk today! First time getting out plein air painting. This is a 60 minute sketch done a few blocks south of Griffith Observatory.
Awesome study! I have always found painting foliage from life very difficult. There is so much information that needs to be filtered out. It overwhelms me. You did an inspiring job!
Progress on one of the master studies I'm doing of the Dan Brereton World's Finest covers. I think I'll let it sit for a while before I do a few final touches.It's almost done.
Wow! It's absolutely mind blowing. It's my most favorite piece amongst your watercolor paintings till date! The forms in the muscle are so well defined!
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30d
These are really striking! Excellent work!
I'm so impressed and inspired by these. The placement of values, the negative painting, the beautiful shapes--this is already at a high level. You should really lean into doing florals.
I'm trying to upgrade my process by doing more preliminary work. I'm doing master studies of the three covers Daniel Brereton did for the Legends of the World's Finest mini-series he did with Walter Simonson.
These are three small color studies I've done of the covers to work out the colors I'll use as I do the full studies.
I have been procrastinating to sit down with my watercolors for a bit too long. This thread is so inspiring that I needed to do something today. This is a study from a painting that I found on pinterest. After 2 failed attempts, I managed to do some justice to the sky.
More spatter practice. I'm doing my best to build the vocabulary I need to paint watercolor.
I've been studying watercolor online with Julie Pollard for about a year and half now. If I'm honest with myself, I've really only picked up the pace to where it needs to be once I combined my watercolor studies with my figure drawing habit.
That said, there are a base set of skills that need to be driven into muscle memory. One of the hardest ones--at least for me--is spattering paint. I'm trying to combine that exercise with my figure drawing, but last night I did a study on nice Arches paper to see how it would look and I'm not disappointed.
This is an exercise from Julie Pollard's book, "Watercolor Unleashed".
One note about color. In painting, the primary colors are red, yellow and blue. The printing color palette is cyan, magenta, and yellow with black added because the other three don't produce a rich black on their own. If you look in this image, I'm using magenta as one of the paints, and when it mixed with yellow, it turned to red, so there you have it--red is only primary-ish.
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2mo
I've really been loving the posts in this thread, thanks for the positive painting peer pressure! I've been trying to unwind with a watercolor (with a teeny bit of white gouache) on the couch at the end of the day with a focus on minimal setup, minimal expectation, and to loosen up a bit. It's been fun! Clearly I've had sushi on the brain :) Keep slingin pigment!
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2mo
LOVE these 🍣🍣
I did this master study today at the National Museum of the Marine Corps at Quantico, VA. They do a class there once a month and in today's class we did a master study of WW2 combat art by Robert Moyr in watercolor.
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2mo
This is intense, incredible atmosphere. Great study!
This is a doodle more than anything, but the black parts were done with a Pentel brush pen, which I like a lot. I *think* it's permanent ink but I'm not 100% sure. It allows you to get a lot of ink on the paper fast.
In this case, I was using smooth Bristol board, which probably isn't the best match for the the tools I was using, but I want to pull the thread on this approach a little more to see if there is anything worth discovering.
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2mo
Awesome character design!
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2mo
All your watercolors look so pretty!
I'm calling this one done. I'm not quite where I want to be with these, but I'm excited about the improvement I'm seeing.
Here is a watercolor that I'm working on. I think it's maybe 70% done. It's hard for me to tell.
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2mo
Wow! This is great. Love the vivid colors
Studied a watercolor painting I found on pinterest. This is my 3rd try.. Happy with how it turned out finally..
Beautifully done, Jyayasi! I also appreciate that you did it over when it wasn't getting to the level you wanted. I need to get into that mindset as well.
Beautifully done, Jyayasi! I also appreciate that you did it over when it wasn't getting to the level you wanted. I need to get into that mindset as well.
Quick rock study and exploring an expanded palette. Up until this point, I've mainly been using four colors--one red, one yellow, and two blues--one light and one for dark values. This palette has a warm and cool yellow and a warm and cool red(ish). This seems to really help with the color mixing. I can get better grays and browns out of this palette. We'll see what comes of it.
