Another wonderful teacher!! Karlyn Holman!

Well, here we go… Day 1 of the Karlyn Holman seminar I'm attending in Toronto this week.

We painted grapes and leaves all day today. Karlyn is SUCH a wonderfully encouraging teacher. She makes sure she compliments and encourages each person. Such a bubbly entertaining personality too! We’re all loving this class. I think it would be a little intimidating if you had never painted with watercolor before, but everyone did wonderfully well and every painting was definitely different! Definitely not a "cookie cutter" kind of class! Different colours and different compositions all based on the same theme. 

This is Karlyn's painting that she is demonstrating on. Her style is all about adding lots of background texture to our underpaintings. Her teaching is full of tips and tricks to try. You can see we used real leaves!

This is the first photo of mine after the big reveal when we pulled the leaves off!  I'm loving the softer colours. I'm STILL not used to watercolour paint drying 3 or more shades lighter LOL!

This is after I've worked on some of the grapes a little bit more. You'll have to take a workshop with her (or ME!!) to find out the nifty trick to get the shading in the grapes!!  

I'm not so happy with my composition, but when you're in a workshop you are trying out so many new things - in a hurry - and sometimes you end up putting things where you might not have put them if you had been able to think things through a little bit more. And sometimes you try things that just don't work the first time the right way... But that's what a workshop is for - to try new techniques which you can then take home and practice again and again.Those paintings you do at home are the paintings you will be happier with.  I'm not unhappy with how this looks so far, but I would definitely move one of those lower bunches of grapes somewhere else!! I have  a lot of work to do on this still. I want to add some branches, add more darks and see if I can balance those grapes out a bit more before I'm done. 

Tomorrow we will be working on abstracts. I hope I can get more than one done.