Watercolor painting by
Xiao Dan Zhao
Xiao Dan Zhao's watercolor learning experience:
This painting is one of my most favor works I did in this semester. I used all I had learned from the class to paint this work and when I look at it, this tranquil country view makes me fell so peaceful.
This work was focus on how to use one color to paint. Before I took this watercolor class, when I thought about the one color painting, it usually associates with simple, flat and boring. But now I knew that with one color, I could use water to control its value between dark to light, as more water I added, the paler the color would become. So with color Value contrast, I can add a lot of detail on my painting and make the painting more lifelike.
First of all, I used red yellow and blue these three primary colors to mix enough of such gray green color for my whole painting. And then I used the very light value of this color to paint the main subject: road and the tree. Next I use some darker value of the same color to create the illusion of distance of the road and the tree. The last step I did was to describe the light source. The part that get light source should be lighter than any other parts and the shadow should be even darker. So color Value contrast is critical to successful watercolor paintings. Even just with one color, it can makes the works look so real.
