Your Year in Art: Watercolor Introduction Whether you call yourself an artist or not, you are one—creativity is an inherent human trait, one that is unique from person to person. The capacity for artistic expression lies in everyone. Sometimes it just needs a little push. Welcome to Your Year in Art: Watercolor! Designed to encourage, inspire, and fuel your art-making all year long, this book features prompts, ideas, and creative tips that will help you build your watercolor skills while also giving you the artistic confidence to triumph over fear of the blank page! Each week, you’ll explore a new creative and engaging assignment. It may be as simple as experimenting with brushstrokes. It might involve practicing a skill you already know. It might mean pushing yourself to try a technique or color you usually don’t use. As you begin your year in art, promise yourself that you will devote time to yourself and your craft. Perhaps it’s just five minutes each morning while you’re drinking your coffee or tea. Perhaps you can spend thirty minutes once a week focusing just on painting. The most important thing is to just do it, regardless of the outcome. You don’t have to make amazing art every day—just paint something. Not every assignment will yield a masterpiece, but that’s not the goal. As long as you make the time to paint, you’ll find your year in art a success! TIP DON’T THROW AWAY THE ARTWORK THAT UNDERWHELMS YOU THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. SAVE IT SO YOU CAN SEE YOUR PROGRESS FROM WEEK TO WEEK AND WATCH AS YOUR SKILLS GROW! Week 2 Make Your Mark Assignment In watercolor, mark-making refers to the ways in which you use your brush to “mark” the paper. There are so many ways you can use each of your brushes that you might not have even discovered yet! Take out all your brushes: round, flat, liner, fan, mop, etc. Dip them in watercolor paint and experiment with the different marks they can make. Push the brush, drag it, paint with it very dry, paint with it very wet, play with pressure—there’s no wrong way to experiment with mark-making. Try as many ways as you can think of with each brush. Try painting a simple object or scene, such as a patch of waving grasses. Make repetitive marks with your brush. Use a slightly drier brush and cold-pressed watercolor paper to create a textured look. Week 6 Building Layers: Assignment Many watercolor pigments are transparent and can be layered to create darker colors or different hues. The key to layering is that each layer must be dry before adding another one, or the layers will bleed together and lose the effect. Start by painting a basic shape in a light wash. Wait for the wash to dry completely, and then paint another similar color over a portion of it. The colors layered together create a new color! Now experiment with different colors and see what you can create.You can also overlap the same color in the same wash, or layer the same color with different degrees of pigment for depth. Think of something that has layers or overlaps, like leaves and petals, and then try out this technique! TIP IF YOU DON’T WANT TO WAIT FOR YOUR PAPER TO DRY ON ITS OWN, YOU CAN USE A HEATING TOOL TO SPEED UP THE DRYING TIME BETWEEN LAYERS.
✔ Author(s): Kristin Van Leuven
✔ Title: Your Year in Art: Watercolor: A project for every week of the year to inspire creative exploration in watercolor painting
✔ Rating : 4.7 out of 5 base on (127 reviews)
✔ ISBN-10: 1633228266
✔ Language: English
✔ Format ebook: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, HTML and MOBI
✔ Device compatibles: Android, iOS, PC and Amazon Kindle
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