Watercolor painting by
Xiao Dan Zhao
Xiao Dan Zhao's watercolor learning experience:
Painting with my house and me: This is the final project of my whole semester water color learning. The project’s topic was to paint myself with my house. Even thought this was the hardest painting I met in this semester, but I really enjoyed painting it because the photo reference that I chose was so meaningful to me. This photo reference was taken in the morning that after a big snowstorm in 2006. It was my first time to see the really snow, because I just moved to Boston less than 1 week before that morning, and my hometown normally have no snow at all. So, you can image how excited I was when I saw the snow. This photo was taken after I used the shovel to remove the snow from the driveway with my aunt, I felt tired but happy. When I was doing this painting, it let me recall this exciting even from my memory.
Let’s talk about this painting process. First of all, I drew a part of my hose and left a large part of paper keeps white to indicate the snow. And I used the light value of color to paint the garage and the forest that a little far away from the front door. Then, I used the enlarge photo to paint me and my aunt, so I can painted the people’s detail more particular. Generally, I was not good at painting people, but this time, with my classmates and teacher’s help and I paid a lot of attention to the enlarge photo reference; it was more look alike than my first painting. The last part was to deal with the snow part. As I talked before, I left that part keep plane white; it’s flat and not genuine. How to show that is snow is the most difficult part of this whole painting. My friend told me that she used to see some light blue within the snow, so I used the blue to indicate the mark of car and people’s footprint, after this process, the snow was look more real.
