Watercolor Workshop

On Friday and Saturday of this week, I stepped out of my box and took a watercolor workshop from a fine artist and fabulous watercolorist, Jann Pollard. The class was held at Filoli in Woodside, California which is one of the finest historical country estates of the 20th century. It was a gorgeous weekend and the gardens were in full bloom. An incredible place to visit.

I've always struggled with watercolors. Part of my problem is that I learned how to use them from an illustrator's perspective, always rendering and noodling everything to death. So taking this class forced me to give up on some of that mindset (no colored pencils to rescue me!!)  and just use color and value and the looseness of the brush. We worked from photographs, and I picked an interior setting because painting a landscape seemed too overwhelming for me. Our palettes were limited and we had to paint a predominately warm or cool painting...whatever was opposite the photograph we were using. So, this was my attempt, which took me about 4 hours....sweating all the way. The hardest part was knowing when to quit....luckily our teacher was hovering close enough to say "Fini!"