more watercoloring

Here's a few more watercolor paintings I've done in my class. I'm getting better each week. Now I can do an entire piece and get a "molto bene!" without the teacher even needing to 'help' (aka fix things). So the last three of these are 100% mine. :)

...this one I did a while back, a picture of an alley in Castiglion with a gypsy like woman in it (he likes drawing those). He had to help me with this one a bit, brightening it up. Oddly, I guess I must try and copy his oil paintings too closely, because often when I do he says, "that's really gray, you should brighten it up", even when his painting that I'm copying is a very gray piece. Oh well, I don't mind. He did color this one up a lot. ... prob. about 70% mine.

This one is of a tuscan church (can't remember where specifically), but the cool part of doing this one was instead of "helping" me at the end, my teacher helped near the beginning, kind of starting off the piece, then I finished it. So the end result is what I ended with... harder to say how much was his work and how much of mine, though, lol.

My first piece all on my own. It's actually rather small, maybe 8x3" or less, but I really like it. He had lots of small oil paintings that were long and narrow like this so I thought I'd give it a shot (though his are even longer... I cropped some of the sides when copying). His only comment was it was rather brown and pale (under the houses is fairly opaque, but the rest and most of my pieces, I tend to leave pretty pale), but otherwise he liked it a lot, and I do to.

This one I did just this week, and while it's even paler than last weeks, I like this one a lot. I thought the colors turned out really nice. It's the same size as the one above (I did them on the same sheet of paper), and all mine again. My teacher liked this one as well.

This one I also did this week, a little tougher. My teacher chose it for me (well, actually, he had another girl doing it first, then had me do it again). It was hard because the oil painting itself was so impressionistic that I had a hard time telling what each part actually was in order to copy it (like, I'm still not quite sure what the bottom section is... I want to say a snow covered fence). And it was also tricky to leave so much white. It's not like acryllic or oil paint where you can just paint white on top once you're done. With watercolor, white is only made through leaving the paper showing, so any white you want in the finished product, you have to leave untouched throughout the entire painting process. ... a lot tougher than it sounds, especially with snow, because snow is hardly ever white-white, only on the highlights and sunny areas. The rest is a wide range of pale yellows or blues or purples. ... and since it's not like I see snow that much, I don't have that much of experience related references in my head. But, I guess it ended up fine, because he didn't feel the need to touch it up any. All a learning process, I suppose.

I love this class though, and I'll be sad to see it go. Since it meets once a week on tuesdays, only 3 more classes left...