french horn watercolor

it's been a while since i've posted any watercolors. and to be honest, i don't pull them out nearly as often as i'd like. which is kind of ironic since they seem to be the hottest thing in scrapbooking and cardmaking right now. i do love working with watercolors though not quite as much as oil based paints.

back in the autumn i decided to be brave and adventurous and create a watercolor for my friend's birthday. she plays the french horn so i decided to tackle that...then i looked them up online and whoa they have a lot of tubing going on. ha! so since this was just a piece for a friend, i found a few images and used them to create a rough trace. i then printed that light trace out onto watercolor paper and got busy putting the colors down. it took me several evenings to get it to the point i was happy with it. first i laid down the base colors then came back in several times to work on the shadows and highlights. and finally i took a pen and lightly did some drawing on the edges to define it even more.

i was quite happy with how it turned out and my friend loved it. looking at this piece again makes me want to go pull out my paints and get started on another piece...

- jess

watercolor love

when i was in college i took several art classes as part of my degree plan. but there were a lot of things that i wanted to learn and my college simply didn't have the classes.  two classes i did take and absolutely LOVED were oil painting 1 & 2.  the sad part is i haven't touched oil paints since college, but i still think about painting almost daily.

fast forward to last year and i found a couple of online classes for watercolor.  i had bought a book and a magazine to try and teach myself, but i'm the type of person that needs to see the techniques demonstrated.  as i took the class i discovered that it is totally different than oil painting and it is still taking me a bit to get used to. but...i now LOVE watercolor too!

sadly i haven't touched it in months. but i ran across these pics from my class and it's totally making me want to pull my supplies back out!

need to just add the paint to this one!

- jess