Course reflections 1: Introduction to Watercolour

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After trying out watercolour in a workshop, I knew I wanted more! I found a 6 week watercolour course for beginners and signed up immediately. 

Week 1- 
We started off with understanding our paints, and creating this handy guide for mixing the cools and warms of the primaries. I referenced this constantly throughout the course.

Week 2-
Our tutor walked us through how to paint the egg and leaf. I'm so proud of the egg I could eat it. It was fun to jump right into painting.

Week 3-
Experimenting with what watercolour can do, wet on wet, wet on dry, adding things to manipulate the texture like salt or isopropyl alcohol etc. By the end of the class we all had a bunch of little experiments that we turned into a handy reference book. Watercolour has so much potential!

Week 4- 
Exploring simple layering to create abstract landscapes. This was really nice, so simple but so effective! I now have many little greeting cards for all my friend's birthdays. 

Week 5-
We were guided step-by-step on painting these beautiful fruits, are they oranges? I appreciated that the tutor told us not to include the blemishes from the original picture, as it wouldn't enhance the final painting.

Week 6-
We followed along to a video tutorial of the bowl painting, the video instructor had a different style to our tutor so she thought it would be helpful for us. I'm not in love with this one, I think i went too crazy on the yellow underglaze and it overwhelms the piece. But the process was still informative.
Our final task was an independent study of these mandarins, no tutor instruction! I'm quite happy with how vibrant these are, I slightly rushed them but they're still fun.

This course was so informative, I feel a lot more confident using watercolour now.

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