With the Tuesday group we are looking at Clematis growing on a trellis and this is the painting that I made of the subject a while back.  The group need the painting to refer to as they finish their paintings at home this week.  They're coming along beautifully!

Wednesday Group Tulip magic!

With my Wednesday group I decided to tackle what was a very inspirational subject...a patch of tulips in my garden backlit by the sun with lovely contrast and complicated cast shadows both in the flowers and the leaves.

I couldn't resist it and they were all up for having a go!

And we all enjoyed the subject. It was exciting...emails were being exchanged about how great a subject it was proving. I was amazed!

But it did provide huge challenges.

For instance the colours. The reds and oranges against the dark green foliage and background were beautiful, but so hard to keep clean and fresh. We all know what happens to green and red when they mix...potential mud!

And then the cast shadows on the tulips, making for a wonderful backlit effect, but so hard to render them naturally and cleanly in watercolour. It was essential to save the light represented by the yellows and the sparkles of white on both leaves and petals and at the same time put in the delicious dark blues and greens which would provide the tonal contrast.

But look how beautifully they have risen to the challenge! See how their tulips stand out against the background and the sense of depth they have created amongst the leaves.

Bravo Sue, Anne, Linda, Margaret, Molly and Maureen. Even in their unfinished and unmounted state, they are beautiful paintings!

Click on the photo for an enlarged view.

Tuesday group shine again!

Another great morning with this enthusiastic and hard working group! Doing one of my favourite subjects, "Sunlit Door".

Once again an excellent set of paintings from Lynn, Helen, Christine, Barbara, Jane and Ann, all of whom do not count themselves as very experienced. Well done all!

The Tuesday group's primrose paintings.

Goodness! it's been well over a month since I posted here. I've been busy with teaching. I arrange my classes in blocks of eight weeks and we're in the middle of a block right now. So the time goes in preparing and trying out projects, painting the subjects I am going to be asking the course members to have a go at.

I wanted to show you the work of my Tuesday group, many of whom are last years' beginners and people with not a lot of experience in watercolour.

Am I proud! Their primrose paintings are wonderful!

Spring Primroses...finished my demo piece

Here's the painting from last Saturday's workshop.

I'm aware more than ever this year of how these flowers seem to appear from nowhere in the garden. They start as a tiny insignificant plant and grow very quickly into a pretty little clump with the creamy yellow flowers showing themselves off proudly against the cold dark February soil.

It takes years to understand and appreciate and know how to paint these flowers...this year I feel as if I'm doing them far greater justice than I did last year. I've tried to portray the delicacy of their petals one against the other and their translucency.

So glad we have the seasons so that our knowledge of every flower can be renewed and consolidated each year when they reappear.

Early Spring Flowers workshop

Well there may only have been five of us, but we had a good time painting primroses and ended up with a clearer understanding of how to portray these little creamy yellow flowers with their delicate petals and knobbly leaves.

Had a lovely lunch with a glass of wine in the sunny conservatory and could have stayed there all afternoon...but there was work to be done!

Here are the paintings, unfinished but looking good...well done everyone!

Click on the photo for a bigger version.

Possible Beginner's class/workshop

As a postscript to my update on Spring Courses yesterday...

Are you a BEGINNER ready to start on your watercolour journey?

I have had one or two phone calls from people who want to take up watercolour and I've been saying that the courses/ classes are for experienced painters.

But I want to welcome beginners...I love starting afresh with people who have still to discover the joys of this medium.

Email me or give me a ring as I may well do a beginner's class if I get at least four people interested. Or I might even run a day workshop for beginners where we can do an introduction to the main techniques and learn about the materials required.

So don't be put off by the fact that the Tuesday course is full...get in touch!

Update on Spring courses

Just to keep you up to date on the Availability of courses and day workshops this Spring.

Tuesday class 8 week course starting Mar 13 Now full

Wednesday class 8 week course starting Mar 14 Only 1 place remaining

Day Workshops with lunch provided

25 Feb Early Spring Flowers 2 places remaining

24 March Spring Flowers 2 places remaining

21 April Early Clematis 4 places remaining on each of these.

26 May Bluebell Time

All the projects will be new. I will not be repeating old projects.

For the courses that become full, I will put people on a waiting list, so please do still enquire and let me know if you are interested.

If you want to come to the Feb and/or March workshop with a friend, now's the time to get in touch!

The garden studio and some members and their work.

Here's a pic of my studio in the summer and a photo of some workshop members with their very beautiful paintings.

Can't wait for the new programme to begin in March!

New Medici cards samples

Some card samples arrived this morning from Medici cards. A section of my painting Village Postbox. Handy size and handy price!

Hope you'll look out for it! They seem to market mostly to garden centres.

Search this blog gadget installed

Oh wow! This IT thing keeps surprising me! Was just looking for something (Primroses) that I knew I had put on this blog somewhere and it was taking ages to trawl through the archive on the info section on the right hand side.

So I looked through the gadgets and found a Blog Search which I've installed, just there on the right. Typed in primroses and the step by step sequence I was looking for came up straight away.

Amazing! Well it is to me!

So you could try typing in anything that interests you in the flower line and I might have done something on it.

A friend just got in touch asking about the rose painting in the title header of my other blog

http://annswatercolourstudio.blogspot.com

and I referred her to some works in progress that I had uploaded in May 2010.

So if you want to see that, just type in Nevada Rose in the search box and see what happens!

The Wisley Orchid painting.

I've removed the orchid painting from here as I think it may be part of the new book!

First demo uploaded in Ann's Art Studio

I've just uploaded the first technique blog in the Ann's Watercolour Studio blog.

http://annswatercolourstudio.blogspot.com/

It's about NEGATIVE PAINTING which seems to both fascinate people and bug them at the same time!

I love this way of painting and really like the 3D effect it gives.

At the same time, I'm working on a small orchid painting which I started yesterday.

I'm using this photo for reference. I took the photo on our visit tothe glasshouse at Wisley Gardens recently. Love the way the orchid is backlit.

My watercolour techniques blog

I'm setting up a sister blog called Ann's Watercolour Studio where I'm going to share techniques with you and perhaps answer questions and solve problems that you have had while doing your watercolour painting.

I want to upload video clips when I've worked out how, and I'll illustrate the techniques with photos.

Hope you'll keep an eye on what's in there!

Click on this link:

http://annswatercolourstudio.blogspot.com/

Workshop notes

Just had a call from a friend who has been to loads of my workshops and who is always the first to boost me up when she gets a chance...lovely Jean.

Something she said has made me think of noting down one or two points re. workshops coming up.

In life things move on and they should never stay the same. If you aren't moving forwards, you'll be moving back at a rate of knots. So with this in mind I am going to change slightly the format of my workshops in line with our developing skills.

Up til now the tried and tested paintalong method with an initial drawing has suited us well. People have been pleased to have a ready made design (though not everyone always uses it, some draw their own) and then to concentrate on the watercolour techniques to paint our own version.

To everyones' constant surprise, the paintings are always vastly different one from the other, as we cannot help, thank goodness, our different personalities shining through, but they are all basically the same painting.

In my workshops a good percentage of the painters are returners...I'm very glad to say. And I think we've all been developing over the last few years, including me. (You never stop learning!) Our experience and confidence are building steadily. What is more, on a practical level my stock of reference material is building up so that now I can offer more choice to people coming to paint.

So I think I would like to work along the lines of everyone choosing their own reference material and making their own design. This would include their own ref. material that they might have brought along, whether real flowers or photos.

I will still demonstrate the techniques that I feel suit the subject. It always helps to see an example of the techniques in use. But then I will coach everyone separately according to how they have decided to tackle the subject.

It might not be as "tidy" a solution as in the past but I think we're ready for it.

Thought I'd upload a pic to cheer us up. Roll on Spring! The snowdrops and hellebores are both about to flower in my garden. Yay! The flowering year is starting again!

Past workshops, Demo paintings and the wonders of masking fluid.

Is it the cold weather or is it that nasty recession thingy... or is it me????

Not had a whole lot of feedback to my reminders about Spring courses. The classes are filling up slowly but surely but I have put an advert in the local free newspaper just to help spread the word.

I sent off the "roughs" of my paintings to the publisher for the orchid book and am now looking forward to March and the trip down to Tunbridge Wells to do the step by step demo paintings while being photographed. I found this to be a good experience when I did my first book.

I like demonstrating paintings and have no problem painting while someone watches. But there is more to it than that and a lot of care has to go into the preparation and design of a piece so that the readers can get the most out of following the different steps.

You have to have thought about your colour mixes and have rationalised them to be the most economical use of paint in the palette. No stopping halfway and changing your mind about a colour or just adding an extra colour for fun!

You have to generally make the painting "do-able" and cannot let yourself go into complete spontaneity. So it has to be quite measured and disciplined.

Which is why the other day I had a sudden desire to let myself go and use masking fluid on the primroses painting, gallons of it, to completely mask out the flowers and then have fun in the back ground. I generally tend to avoid using it too much with students as they are apt to be frightened of it. Unless you use it often, as I have been doing over the years, you tend not to believe that it's best to put a good thick layer of it on the paper. But that is the best thing to do as it comes off very easily then.

But I digress. The photo I've up loaded for you today was taken after a Pansies workshop. It summarises a workshop...drawings, photographic reference, real flowers, painting materials and the finished painting. Pansies are such perfect little flowers...they have inbuilt contrast with those splodges of dark on their faces as though smeared with blackberry jam!

Spring Classes

Are the creative thoughts stirring? The artistic juices starting to flow?

I still have spaces in my SPRING WEEKLY CLASSES on Tuesday and Wednesdays starting 13 March 2012 for eight weeks.

The Tuesday class will be for Beginners/Improvers and the Wednesday class for more experienced improvers.

I have only ONE place left on Wednesdays.

THREE places left on Tuesdays.

Also there are still places on my DAY WORKSHOPS where we spend the day painting and you are treated to a two course lunch with wine!

25 Feb Early Spring Flowers

24 March Spring Flowers

21 April Early Clematis

26 May Bluebell time (probably a landscape)

All the details are on my website in events where there is a booking form you can print off.

Also there are details on the side bar of this blog.

My artistic juices are definitely starting to flow now along with the juicy watercolour washes and the Spring flowers and bulbs are poking through the soil...snowdrops, primroses, hellebores...can't wait!

January primroses

I painted this today having been inspired by the little clump of primroses I saw in the front garden. They looked so perfect against the dark earth and I just love these opportunities to get outrageous contrast with pale flowers against a dark back ground.

Happy New Year!

Well it's New Year's Day 2012 and I wish everyone a good year with good health, lots of artistic inspiration and all around positivity and joy!

It's raining and windy but not too cold...in fact unseasonably mild, but I'm sitting here in the studio at 16.30 and it's pitch dark outside. Which presents problems if you want to photograph work at this time of year. You have to plan things so that you do any photography early on in the day if you want to catch the daylight.

I'm working on the Painting orchids book and I am at the point of being able to send the proposed demo pieces to Search Press, the publishers. But I need to photograph them all and the drawings and today I missed the light. It'll have to be tomorrow now.

So frustrating not being able to show you what I've been doing. I'm quite pleased with the paintings and I love the bright colours and exotic shapes of the orchids.

The garden is in its brown/ grey Winter state but there are signs of life, snowdrops poking through and other bulbs pushing up through the dark cold earth.

But one plant is making a brave face of it...the Winter jasmine with its starry yellow flowers brightening the North facing side of the shed where it grows. I've up loaded a painting I did last year where I was wanting to depict the tangle of branches and leaves and the yellow stars shining out.

Orchids 'R' Us...Getting down to work on the new book.

Orchid mania is rife in my house at the moment. I've started work in earnest on the book I'm doing for Search Press in the Ready to Paint series.

Orchids were not flowers I knew much about before about four months ago...but I've learned such a lot about them and I've begun to understand why they are loved by so many people. They are amazingly various in colour and form and grow in tropical forests as well as in English meadows and woodlands.

I'm having a great time researching and poring over pictures in books and on line and waiting for inspiration to come, which it does, often, out of the blue. I'm at the stage of working out the designs for the step by step projects in the book. And actually I am spoilt for choice as there are so many varieties and different forms of this flower.

I painted a still life today and the inspiration for a simple background came suddenly to me during the night. And I was raring to go today having completed the drawing yesterday and I finished the painting early afternoon. But I can't show it to you! I have to keep it all under wraps of course. So I'm just posting a photo of my desk today as I was feverishly painting one picture while allowing another one to dry.