LESSON PLANS SPRING TERM 2024 (2nd half) Lesson 2: daffodils and/or tulips, in celebration of Spring.

In this lesson I'm asking my students to work with watercolour and to allow random elements and happenings to occur during the process of making the painting. It means there will be no fixed outcome, more a case of seeing what happens in response to the subject and the processes.

Above are some wonderful examples of daffodils, loose but concise in places, subject to random happenings and some 'more or less' control.

Spring Term 2nd half 2024 – Lesson 2. Watercolours, daffodils or tulips, wet-into-wet painting.

·         Loosely, well wet your page with wide strokes of your biggest brush (a hake brush would be idea if you have one). Some areas will be wet and other areas will remain dry.

·         Set your flowers in front of you and half close your eyes. What are the general areas of colour and what are the colours?

·         On your palette, mix up some good amounts of the colours you see and loosely paint them in the right-ish place, letting the colours that fall into the wet areas float off beyond your control!

·         Enjoy yourself! You might even at this stage begin another painting so that the first one has an opportunity to dry a bit.

·         If you’ve placed your flowers in a jam-jar or transparent vase, look at what happens when the water and glass refract the light around the stems and through the surface of the water. You’ll see some interesting shapes and stem-disconnects going on.

·         As your first loose wash dries (and you can work through the stages of drying to see how your paint reacts on the gradually drying page) look for shapes of a darker tone which can surround and reveal a lighter shape (such as around the bright daffodils).

·         Look for shapes within the jar or vase. If it’s a solid vase, how does it relate to its background all along its edges?

·         Keep adding shapes – try to let the painting retain a more unfinished look rather than be over-worked.

Next lesson: The same, but with the addition of line (black gel pen, pencil, charcoal pencil) and white paint (emulsion, acrylic or gouache). Bring flowers again but you may vary the type you bring and could add some foliage.