Learning Watercolor

From grade school onward, I've avoided art class.  I just don't judge myself creative but admire people who are.  It's not that I don't appreciate the visual arts.  Museums often highlight visits to a new city, or even my own.  And I have all the equipment accumulated over the years.  Those complete art kits for $20, pastels, calligraphy ink, decent drawing pencils, appropriate paper.  They just stay on my desk or next to it.  The exception might be photography.  I enjoy taking pictures and learning about cameras but never at an expert level.

So this OLLI cycle I committed myself to a beginner's art course.  My first preference was drawing, as it needs little equipment.  However, its time slot coincided with a lecture course in paleontology that I really wanted to take.  Next best option, watercolor as I have those 99 cent tins from the back to school sales.  So I signed up for that.

I assumed art courses would be held on-site like other elements of performance from instrumental music to physics lab.  I suppose you can create a ripple tank by filling up the tub and tossing in some beans.  Chemistry would be harder, as gas lines, fireproof counters, and availability of deionized water would challenge Zoom instruction.  My alma maters have figured this out and prioritized performance classes, whether science lab or the arts, as the first to return to campus when pandemic safety becomes a more prudent risk.  And they did that.  To my surprise, OLLI has lectures but many of their arts instructors still have the heebie jeebies about being in a room with Medicare beneficiaries who harbor who knows what in their microbiomes drastically altered with antibiotic prescriptions written contrary to majority medical opinion.  We are zoonotic in that sense.

So watercolor would need to be introduced online.   Back to school tins of paint, or pigments as the real artists call them, are classified a little like greasy kids stuff that you should not use.  A trip to Michael's and a $30 Visa charge got me pretty close to the written supply list.

First class.  Personable instructor.  Only one on Zoom without a Medicare card.  She and I were the only ones in the class who never went through menopause.  Assembled newspapers to protect the dining room table, filled a saved cottage cheese cup tub with tap water, took out the supplies, and ready to go,  If I am not good at art, I am good at chemistry and proportions.  She went over brushes.  Mine were good enough, synthetic sable.  They come in squirrel too, though apparently not in moose.  Some hold water better than others.  Apparently the pigments are more of an afterthought.  Water coloring is really more about controlling water.  That means portioning with pigments, saturating the absorbent paper or skimping on the water as circumstances require, getting a spray bottle which was not on the supply list to moisten things with clean water instead of pigment tainted liquid in the cottage cheese tub.  

My Artist's Loft beginner watercolor spectrum has 24 12 ml tubes.  Since she took red, yellow, and blue, squeezing a dab into three wells of her white plastic pallet, I did the same, maybe about half the amount of Brylcream's a little dab'll do ya.  Then water.  She had an eye dropper.  I had either my fingers or a gentle pour from the tub.  Got close to 1:1 pigment to water ratio for red and yellow, more like 1:4 for blue pouring directly from water tub.  Apparently can compensate later.  Then strokes on dry paper, using flat brush with flat edge, corner of flat brush, then cylindrical pointy brush.  Each consistency flowed, but intensity varied with dilution.  

Next exercise, wet paper.  From that vary the intensity of the colors by either refilling the brush every two strokes or not refilling it at all, forcing paint to be used up by the final stroke, all done with a big flat brush.  Then she had us wet the paper, pick a color, paint it, and finally remove some of the paint, both with a paper towel and with a brush.  Gives the illusion of clouds.

Coming from a lineage of apartment painters, my father's brother-in-law who then hired my father out of high school until the Army offered other opportunities, I was taught basic interior painting.  Many of the walls of my home were done by me and still look good thirty years later.  Those were also water based paints, though not diluted and without much finesse.  Was mostly fun until cleanup.  Would not be fun today, which is why I now hire people to do this.

Watercolor was different.  It forgave errors, perhaps there really are no errors.  At this point nobody will critique my work, as my father z"l sometimes did when he visited and noticed the ceiling-wall junctions looked amateurish.  I could choose the colors without being locked into what I chose.  Watercolor gave me more control over the paint than I remember with any other attempts at art going back to early grade school, with the possible exception of finger painting.

Do I want to get proficient?  More so than I did when I signed up for the course.  Have to see what can be accomplished in the next four sessions.