Working with wet watercolor and aquarelle will help your journal sketching become more lively and spontaneous. Instead of carefully drawing lines and then coloring them in, we’ll invert the process, splashing down loose watercolor and then drawing into it to define shapes. We’ll also explore some special effects you can get with wet-on-wet watercolor. This approach is very forgiving, allowing you to feel your way gradually into a drawing, discovering the scene as you build it up.
Tools to gather before the workshop
- Scraps of whatever good-quality watercolor paper you can lay your hands on
- Whatever watercolor paints you usually use
- A waterbrush (or regular brush and a little jar of water)
- Any water-soluble pencils you already have (also called aquarelle or watercolor pencils.) If you don’t have any, buy a couple of neutral gray or brown pencils, one dark and one mid-value.
The class was taught by Laurie Wigham, recently returned from the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Manchester where she watched some of the world’s best sketchers working this way. Her previous class for the NJC was Making your Nature Journal Sketches Come Alive, July 2015.
You can download a pdf of the slides for the lecture and follow the workshop on video below.