WORKING ON A JANUARY CLASS LESSON

Before you know it, the holidays will be over and we'll be back to the regular day-to-day.  Part of my day-to-day in January will be having my beginning watercolor students come back to the house for classes.  With that in mind, I should have a few lesson plans for them.  And I was thinking about how to help them be lighter with the paint and brushes and use more water...

So what about using only ONE color and painting something that limited, seeing how light and dark you can get with a good pigment.  I have some flamingo photos so...using just Permanent Alizarin Crimson from Daniel Smith, I'm painting a small (1/4 sheet) flamingo with just a pink background.  

I masked off the pure whites of the bird since I'm going to cover the paper with the first layer of pink.

The first pale wash of pink (Aliz Crimson) on over the whole thing.  Then went back in with a darker mix of Aliz Crimson on the bird.

I sprinkled a bit of table salt on the bird to get some texture on the body.

The next step is to scrape off the salt (after the paper dried completely) and put another darker layer of the Aliz Crimson on the bird, here and there.  Shaping the bird.  


I fiddled with the white balance on the camera and this looks more like the background in real life - a pale pink still using only Permanent Alizarin Crimson from Daniel Smith.  


So far so good...