“Fast & Furious” Watercolor Demonstrations

On Tuesdays, I teach two watercolor classes.  Here are two finished watercolor demonstrations of sleeping cats.

In the cat with pots, I showed two ways to get a smooth transition from color to shadow.  I used water to thin out the paint on the right side of the blue pot, using thicker blue paint in the middle of the pot and then black.  On the red pot, I painted just red to black.

After it was dry, I used Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser to lift out the highlights on the red pot.  The bricks, pots and shadows were done with cobalt blue, quinacridone red and aureolin yellow. It makes great grays when you let it mix on the paper.

To make the green, I used a bit of thalo blue with the yellow and perylene green for the black.  (And a touch of burnt sienna for the cat’s colored areas.)

The Trick Is Not To Overmix The Watercolor

In the second demo, I used all the leftover bits of watercolor on my palette behind the cat, working quickly on dry paper so I got soft blending. Then I used the mixture of the leftover colors to put a strip of blue gray across the bottom.

While that was drying, I went back to cobalt blue, aureolin yellow and quinacridone red for the shadows on the cat, putting the colors down and letting them mix on the paper.

The class said it looked too garish while it was wet.  There lies the trick!  If you let wet washes  alone, they often shape up nicely as they dry.

Then I painted the black face and the ears.  I rubbed the shadow edges with a soft brush and dabbed with a paper towel to soften the edges, and used a few strokes of white for whiskers.  I thought the stripe across the bottom was boring, so I used a stencil to lift out goldfish and painted sweet dreams for this fellow.