Fall Leaves And Audra’s Eagle
Jody in the fall leaves with Zoe, Leo and Jody's Taurus Mug.
Audra and I began her class with the mixing of her colors for the eagle’s feathers. I asked her to mix up ten different shades of brown while not using any brown paint. This is an excellent skill to learn, because we now understand that colors that are made by combining minerals and stains are more interesting than a flat pigment.
Audra on November 1st.
Audra mixed mineral blues with burnt sienna and cadmium orange and yellow ochre to create her first browns. I then allowed her to add sepia to darken her shades.
Audra mixing cerelian blue with yellow ochre and crimson.Once again, we start by wetting the small area to be painted with water and placing the colors to create a wash. Audra's eagle has aproximately 100 feathers, which is a large amount for an 11-year-old girl. Each feather is less than an inch in length, so managing the colors within such a small space is challenging. Note: The blue at the base of the feather. This will help all the feathers create more definition in the final painting.
The most challenging part of today’s class, was painting the sky behind the eagle. Audra spent almost 10 minutes just getting the background wet enough, so that when we put the colors in, there would not be places that dried. Creating this large of a wash is difficult, even for an expert.
See the large wet on wet wash behind Audra's eagle and her interesting blue color palette on the glass. A lot of paint was pre-mixed on the glass before we began the wash.
The reason the sky had to be painted before the rest of the feathers, is because you must paint from light to dark with watercolor. If you painted the dark feathers first, when you put the light sky next to them later, the brown would run into the sky. Audra is especially excited about her eagle, because it will become the logo painting for her cousin Brian Cronk.
Jody on the path in front of her ranch on Chuckanut Mountain.
