Many of my watercolor paintings are created as demonstrations, spontaneously, without much planning. It’s difficult to know what each group or student wants, so I have to switch swiftly from one subject to another, from one color palette to the next. Fall season watercolor paintings shine through the light and numerous shades of red, burnt sienna, golden ocher, warm, deep or cool yellow shades, orange, grey, purple an so forth. Fall season watercolor paintings allow using many approaches and techniques.
I am sticking this time to fall season watercolor, but we have done also many new acrylic artworks. It is a good time to be indoors and immerse oneself in bright colors. I paint in layers which means I create a map of a painting with weaker tones at first and then gradually bring it to the necessary value and color temperature. None of that is visible on my photos which look mostly yellow. There’s a reason I dislike Apple and their iPhone. No chance to get true colors. I’ve tried everything, but it’s too automated to recognize all colors at once.
Nevertheless, the actual paintings are large (24 x 18” or 61 x 46 cm) and look quite impressive, just as required for display of the fall season watercolor versatility. I’d love to let images speak for themselves, even though photos are all wrong.
The attendance at classes is fairly good and I have to repeat some observations. If you intend to learn painting, you have to go big. Postcard size images don’t allow to implement many things. I haven’t seen any student yet who learned painting using video tutorials and online courses. Quite the opposite – nobody knows anything about brushes, paper, how to use whatever they have and so on. There’s no knowledge of direction of light or values. We usually start from scratch. First purely basic techniques and then more complex matters.
This time is a fantastic for observing nature. Many people try painting trees, structures and buildings, but the first step is to look at them as they are in nature or in reality and try to remember what exactly a tree looks like. There are numerous sorts of them, but none here has wider and fatter branches than the trunk. The branches thin out rewards the top. Natural things have randomness to them and it’s important to remember that nothing in nature grows equal distance apart. Basically, your subjects are everywhere and you just have to look at them.
It’s a great season to start painting. The most gains and successes come from practice and observation. We make errors to learn from them. We learn from doing, not exactly watching. Watching gives an idea, but doing is superior to watching. Or talking, or thinking about it. Doing makes one master of the trade, so, the next step – take your brush, paints and paper and on to painting the colors of fall season!
