Watercolor painting by
Raina Mcmahan
Raina Mcmahan's watercolor learning experience:
My experience in this painting class has been a very positive one. Watercolor has taught me to relax and to literally go with the flow of things. When I started, I was intimidated by watercolor. I could not control it like I could with acrylic painting. As I progressed in the class, I learned the various ways watercolor could be controlled, and I believe I have progressed tremendously in this short semester. I have enjoyed very much painting from the pictures I have and making a greeting card for my Mom. I enjoyed painting from a picture of my mother also.
Painting the picture of my Mother taught me a lot because I took more time with it, because after all, it is my mother, and didn’t want to make her look like a monster! I spent the extra time to draw her face out first, which is what we learned in one of our last classes. I think a lot of us were not taking the time to draw the painting out first and our paintings were struggling as a result of that. I spent the extra time to draw her face out and made sure everything was where it was supposed to be. I did end up painting some of the colors wrong, but it was a good practice run for my next painting of her. I will spend more time focusing on the colors next time and make sure I am painting as watercolor, not using watercolor like an acrylic paint. I have learned to paint the colors of the picture, not the lines in the picture, which I was doing before. I now paint the blocks of color, and don’t see black and white so much as a shadow being a deep purple or blue, and white being just the paper itself. I won’t use my white paint anymore, as I was using that white paint as a crutch.
