Watercolor painting by
Lisa Carson
Lisa Carson's watercolor learning experience:
I am writing to you in reference to the painting that I painted for the water color class on saturday. It was the painting of my Grandfather. The back ground story of this painting is that My mom did not know who her father was until she was 42 years old. When she found out who her dad was. It took her 16 years to decide whether or not to contact his family or not but she decided to contact them. She was 58 years old then and it has been seven years now that she has had this picture of her dad. This is the reason why I wanted to paint the picture for her to have a larger copy and hopefully a better view of her dad. While I was painting the picture I was very concerned not to make any mistakes but obviously I did make a few. This was my very first painting of a portrait and I think that it came out quite nice. It does have a resemblance to him. When I started painting my grandfathers face I began to only see lines, in class you showed me that it is not the lines to look for! it is the shapes and shadows then my eye started to see them as I went on painting everyday for about seven days 3-4 hours a day I found that putting the shapes together was like putting a puzzle together. At times it was very frustrating when I noticed that some of the shapes were not quite right and I had to keep taking some of the paint off by lifting it then repainting over. The paper was not what I thought it should be I did not know that there were different qualities of watercolor paper either. But I loved only working with one color and graduating it darker and lighter as needed. This helped me to "see" the shading of the face much easier. My mom loved the painting when I gave it to her she said the more she looked at it the more it looked like her dad's picture.
