Watercolor Class - July 2014

This past July I took a watercolor class at Hope College, taught by Bruce McCombs.  I absolutely love watercolors.  Although I wasn't taught a lot in my class, I did learn a lot.  I think that my watercolors have improved, and I'm so happy about it.

Flower

A Lautrec Bag: Moulin Rouge

Panera Bread Bag

A Moynihan Bag

A 20+ hour painting of part of downtown Holland, MI.  

More Watercolors

I'm really trying to get all of my previous artwork up here, and these are some of my other watercolors that I'd previously done.  This first one is a rib cage (which I love) with flowers coming from inside it.  I had to be really careful with the shading so that it was obvious that some parts of the rib were further back than the front ribs.

 This is a dying rose.  It wasn't painted on watercolor paper and so it has started to buckle the paper.  I was really captivated by the sight of this dying rose, with the darker colors that were appearing in the petals.

This final picture (promised to my sister) is of an old abandoned wagon.  The wagon itself was in my Drawing I class during my Junior year of college, but the background and the overgrown flowers were all my idea.  

Trees and Flowers

 These pictures range from 2012-2014, I believe, and are of trees and flowers.  Flowers were the first images from nature that I really began to draw.  I loved doing them in any medium, from pencil to watercolor to acrylic paint.  Trees soon followed and I fell in love with drawing them, especially bare trees during the winter time.

Inspired by a tree at Hope College

This first picture is done with oil bars, if you don't know what they are, they are like big cylindrical bars that are made up of something like oil paint.  That probably isn't a really good description... If you want a real description of what an oil bar is, go here. Oil bars are incredibly fun to use, very messy (that's where most of the fun is, in my opinion!), and vibrant.  I only used black and white oil bars here, but I love the result.  Oh, and do you see the human figure in the tree?  Was it intentional?  I don't know, and I'm not gonna tell!

This next piece was done with pencil, and was drawn from a photograph. The flower is originally red in color, but I decided to do it in black and white.  Noticing a theme here?  It's true, I do like monochromatic pieces.

                                            

Pencil drawing of a flower I saw in Spain

This flower below was done in watercolor and it is one of my favorite, if not the favorite, flowers on the page.  I paid close attention to the shading and made sure I defined the edges of the flower well. 

           

A rose from my grandma's garden

The next flower is... hard to see.  I'll admit it, but I wanted to include it anyways.  It was really the first time I had ever tried cross-hatching with pencil.  Cross-hatching is when you make straight lines in one direction, then go over it in another direction(s) to make the value darker.  It was not my favorite way to draw with pencil, but it was definitely interesting!

The same rose from my grandma's garden

You guessed it! The same rose, again, from my grandma's garden

This final flower is, I believe, the first time I ever really experimented with pastels.  I had a fresh new set but I didn't know what to draw. So, I turned to a subject that I'd already drawn several times before, in several different ways.  Is it weird to say that my favorite part of the work is, in fact, the background?  Because it is.

This final picture was not based on a
photograph, if I remember correctly.  In fact, I think it came straight out of my head.  Maybe that's why I don't like it as much...  Anyways, this work was done with watercolors, which is pretty evident by the rather translucent looking colors.  Let me just say, landscapes are really difficult for me!