Driftwood Shoreline

Something new has come up for me and it is proving to be a challenge: teaching a class on ink and watercolor. It doesn't sound too hard but to demo and have the class achieve something in 2 hours can be a challenge. My style requires a lot of drawing and many new artists are not confident with their drawing skills so I needed to find something they would be able to draw fairly quickly so they would have time to paint. I picked a picture of the shoreline as driftwood can be very forgiving when you draw it and it really takes on a new life with ink. I prepared my picture so it would show the three stages of my process for my demo: painted, inked and drawn. I really wanted to show how the cross-hatching can work with the watercolor to provide texture to the picture and that black ink can work with the softness of watercolor. I do find that putting in such strong black areas with ink really helps me to get darks in my watercolors and prevent that washed out look. (I know that is good for some things but not everything.) I am sorry to see that my scan did not pick up my pencil marks that well but I was trying to show that the pencil is used for defining the shapes and very little detail. The detail is done more with the ink however here again you do not want to draw everything. The ink on top of the watercolor is darker than the ink under the watercolor so by putting your marks on at different times you are able to get several values with your ink. Of course there is nothing stopping you from reinking an area already inked and of course that will often happen as you want to bring something forward more or make it stand out. If you are trying this technique have fun with it, the best part is inking after you paint and working with the flow of the watercolor on the paper. I will let you know in my next blog how things went with the class.