Lesson 24: Design Game

The challenge: Create an abstract beginning with a magazine food photo. Cut or tear a magazine photo of food into roughly 3" section. Choose 3 or four and glue to a sheet of watercolor paper.


Here Jan has glued on four sections randomly. Next find a way to connect dark and light shapes.



Here Leslie has begun working out a design by connecting red areas with a ribbon and dark brown areas with angled pieces. The goal is to match colors so closely that in the end one cannot tell which area is photograph and which is painting.



Theresa has her design further along. Using the color palette of the photograph creates a harmonious design.


Marilyn was able to match the reds and greens to form a fractured image.

Lesson 23 Back-lit Produce

When an object is lit from the back the form is flattened and is defined by a narrow band of light along the edge. For this exercise we set up, photographed and painted simple fruit shapes back-lit by strong sunlight.


Evert kept the strong sun-lit areas white on top of the fruit.


Alice found interesting shadow patterns on the granite countertop.


Susan depicted the fruit using bold, dark shapes.

Jessalyn used rich wet in wet dark washed to create dramatic shadows and reflections.

Lesson 22: Painting a still life using only three colors

For this exercise we set up several small still life arrangements and each of us created a painting using only 3 tubes of paint. Some chose to use three primary colors which give the widest range of color possibilities. Others chose to work with colors they were not comfortable with or wanted to experiment with. In both approaches the paintings were cohesive color-wise because of the limited palette. It was interesting to compare paintings of the same still life set up from people using different three color choices.


Kay and Jan used the same set-up. Kay's colors resulted in more muted tones; Jan used primaries which gave brighter reds and yellows.


Emily and Dan used the same set up. Here Emily's choices gave more muted tones while Dan's use of the primaries yielded brighter colors.

Lesson 21: Snow on Evergreens

Snow is white; evergreens are dark and therefore paintings of snow on evergreens will utilize a wide value range which can yield dramatic images. In this class we considered arranging value shapes to create different size areas of light and dark. We also discussed modeling snow mounds with glazes to give them depth.

Jo chose to focus in on one small branch


Elaine rendered crocuses peaking through the snow.

Bev played with a variety of cool colors, interesting shapes and levels of snow clumps.

Linda created deep shadows on the snow and left bits of pure white to make it sparkle.