It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon when we gathered in the garden at Soul Project in Laguna Beach. The mission, get creative with watercolor painting roses and sipping a variety of Rosé wine. Fleur de Sel cookies were the perfect accompaniment to it all thanks to Summer’s Table. Scroll down to see more of the creative process and how we were all inspired.
We started this Watercolor and Wine workshop with what I like to call warm-up exercises. Each element of painting the rose was broken down into to simple steps. I always like to give my attendees a couple ways of completing a painting. With the roses there was three techniques and they could pick which ever one they felt most confident and comfortable with to compete their final rose painting. After going over materials, use of color and rose techniques we went over a few basic ways to paint leafs as well. You can see my clipboard below with the instructional warm-up pages and what follows is the attendees work in progress. You can already see how quickly they picked up on painting from my simple step by step instructions.
“When things are simplified it makes it a lot easier to get creative with something new.”
I love the warm-up exercises to get everyone started on their creative journey for the workshop. One is able to discover how to hold the brush and get just the right ratio of paint to water. I always say the key word in ‘watercolor” is “water.” For my workshops we use watercolor cakes so the paint is dry to begin and you really need to add water to get the pigment to flow onto the page. This is why the warm-up exercises are so important to discover this. Once the technique is established the painting process quickly turns from figuring it out to a more meditative state where attendees are able to just flow with the organic nature of watercolor. Repetitive shapes and motions ease the mind into a tranquil state.
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of the everyday”
-Pablo PIcasso
Read more in the latest post…
