An evening of coffee fun...

Last Thursday Rosaura of Pigment and Parchment had a fun evening workshop involving watercolor and hand lettering. It was to honor Coffee Week here in Sacramento, so she held it at Vic's Cafe (next to Vic's Ice Cream). 

We dabbled in some watercolor techniques, then played with hand lettering and made a coffee themed page. There was lots of laughter and fun (and coffee) as we enjoyed the 2 hour class.

It reminded me how much fun watercolors and hand lettering (not always together) can be. I need to get back to both of them and play here at home more!

WOYWW #207

Well I totally flaked out about it last week and didn't take any pix of my workdesk for the WOYWW linky party! That is what the end of school days does to me! 2 more weeks and then 10 weeks of vacation! Then next year is my last year at work! Not that I don't love what I do but it is TIME to retire!

So last night I was looking at all the stuff from that watercolor class last weekend and decided to take a photo of one of the techniques I hadn't shown already. And before I go on I want to say: I HATE THE NEW FLICKR INTERFACE!! Takes a LOT longer to get my photos to blog!

This is what we did: made an abstract watercolor and let it dry. Then we took a small frame (a card with a hole cut in the middle). We cut out three areas that we liked in the abstract.

And then he gave us blank cards (from Kelly Paper) and we glued the swatch on and voila! A mini-painting!

These are the only 2 brushes we used in the class! I love how the calligraphy brush held the paint -- might look into getting other sizes of it.

Linked to:
WOYWW
Paint Party Friday
Show and Tell Saturday

Watercolor class...

Yesterday I took a 7 hour watercolor class @ the Learning Exchange in Sacramento. It was taught by local artist Robert Dvorak. All in all it was a great class but I did discover something about myself: 7 hours is way too long for me to be in any sort of class, fun or not! I was exhausted when I got home! I was reminded of that old Far Side cartoon about being excused from class because my brain was full! I think my learning curve started petering out around 3 pm...

But none the less, I learned a ton of techniques and came away with a much great appreciation of watercolor as a medium.

And... came away with the total appreciation for needed a LOT of practice to get good at it. It was quite the challenge!

We used a 7"x10" watercolor block and did a lot of exercises and techniques. Here are a few of my meager attempts...

Mountain with waterfall:

People:

Trees:

Banana:

It was a fast-paced with lots of laughter and fun! A couple of other things I learned about myself: I need to wash my hands more as evidenced by the dirty smudges on my examples, which I did not edit out due to sheer laziness on my part this morning! I also need to move my shoulders and neck around more -- I was very sore when I got home. Even though we had a lot of breaks and up and down times moving out paintings out to dry, I think when I paint I tense up too much and was definitely feeling it when I got home. Relax Rhonda!

Linking to:

Mandarin Orange Monday
Blue Monday
Monday Mellow Yellow
Creative Every Day