Hello, dear readers! Today we will talk about teaching watercolor painting.

This article is made in the spirit of some of my past publications and is based on lessons with one of my students. We worked with her for 6 hours (3 lessons for two hours in a row), and today I will share the results of the lesson, also touching on the details of the drawing process.

A little about the theme of the work. In the classroom, I wanted to tell the student how to work with island fills, without the use of wet continuous techniques of wetting the whole sheet. All work went on a dry sheet, only partially we did soft transitions, using small wet areas on paper.

As a sample, so that it was as clear as possible, I did not use nature, and offered to copy the finished watercolor work, finding a suitable reference in the network. Since we were talking about a specific technique, it seemed to me that this approach, though not academic, but will be the most optimal for a not very long time lesson.

When drawing watercolors in this style, first of all you need to make a very detailed contour of each future fill. That is, to draw not just a set of lines, namely the contours with clear boundaries of each of the future colorful areas.

Of course, to figure then not much conspicuous, later it is better to soften the eraser-nag or just initially apply it very light lines.

Before that and above in the text I gave the results of our first two hours of drawing. Here you can see that the tracing of the contour took us a very long time. However, we managed to start working with paints a little bit.

Note: Our works were on paper of different quality. My student used a thick watercolor paper with a light grainy texture, I also traditionally had an artistic drawing paper "len". We worked on A4 format, so many small details of the original drawing consciously simplified, since the original is most likely made on paper size A3 or even A2.

Here I took a picture of your drawing. Here on the edges of the visible unpleasant artifacts-cobwebs, which appeared, when I initially tried to do pouring not immediately brush, and pre wetting the each of "islets." In the future, because of the not very pleasant features of my paper, I refused such a reception and just immediately poured the desired area with a brush with the paint typed on it.

At the next two-hour lesson we went to work with paints. The main point of our work now was to make the first layer of numerous large and small fills. My drawing shows how the work progressed.

Draw refracted facets of glass – an interesting practice. Of course, everything is simplified here, because we have a ready-made picture before our eyes. But at one of the next classes I will definitely offer the girl to draw in the same technique, but from nature.

Above is the result of my student's drawing. This is at the end of the second day of class. Actually, I did not expect that classes will last so long, but by and large such complex work are drawn long, and the girl well done: not a crybaby and not rush things.

Here it is visible that it as a whole well copes with a task, however, sometimes "slips" out of the blue. According to her, they did not draw in this technique at the art school.

By the end of the third lesson I almost finished the work, although, if we take into account the small details, there still could be a lot of work. Some unimportant elements I generally greatly exaggerated.

In fact, all the work here is quite trivial. If you have at hand a ready reference, especially a reproduction of someone's watercolors, the process of drawing is not too complicated. However, it is necessary to immediately warn novice artists from the apparent ease of drawing in the technique of "Islands". When you do something like that from nature, you will have to visually split the picture into small elements. Not the fact that you can easily do it immediately and easily. This lesson is just a demo one only techniques, do not be deluded by his supposed simplicity.

Here is the result of my student's work after 6 hours of classes. Of course, even with a lot of time left, the child did not have time to do everything quickly and easily. But I did not set a task for her to draw as quickly as possible. It was important to me that she felt the technique and got used to it a little. Let the girl fulfilled only part of the equation, but in General, I think, good for her.

My student is 15 years old. She is preparing to enter an art University in the near future. In the next class, I promised her to paint with oil paints. I will share about our success in my next publications. Stay tuned!

The article used the pictures from the lessons of the author

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