by Pastor Audrey
This was an exercise I felt I botched from the beginning. And the more I tried to “fix” it, the worse it got. There is such a thing in watercolor, I’m learning, as over working a piece. I was trying for a particular outcome – but watercolor can have a mind of its own. That’s part of what makes it so wonderful. The colors find each other, making beautiful color blends in such extraordinary and often unexpected ways. It’s hard to paint the same thing twice.
The exercise had us working with value and shadow. Deepening value is when the color intensifies; add more water and that same color lightens in value, becoming much more translucent. We started just by putting some color on the page, moving it around, adding another color, letting them bleed together and make magic – AND in the course of filling the page, creating lighter and darker values. I only remembered that last bit when I was almost finished, so I had to be satisfied with about half of what was on the page. This is the part I later tried to fix but ended up with a muddy mess.
The more I worked on my piece, the more I hated it. I wanted to tear it out of my watercolor journal so no one would ever see. But before I did that, I at least wanted to finish the exercise. I needed to paint in some branches. Janice Leppke, our beloved watercolor teacher for this class, instructed us not to use the brown in our pallets. Instead, we were to use all three of the primary colors, again letting them roll all around each other, forming their own mix of brown with various highlights of each individual color peeking through.
At this point I was flat out mad and I approached this task of painting my branch with a reckless attitude. I even dipped my brush, full of blue paint, straight into the yellow paint pan! (Yes, artists do this all the time, but I’m never so bold.)
You might have guessed how this turned out… I loved my branch! The upper right hand corner, where I was able to get the background values light enough, with all the colors coming through on the branch – that corner became enough.