Watercolor color mixing studies

The world around me is white and gray, but in my classroom at Castleton State College there is COLOR!

It was so much fun to guide this group in color exploration, composition and design elements.

There were some pretty fantastic results, especially considering that many of the students (first year through senior college students) had not taken an art class since middle school.

We worked on the tricks of the trade in watercolor creating textures and learning how different colors interact as they blend and flow on palette and paper. We explored opacity, earth colors, transparency, washes, brush manipulation, etc.

What they didn’t realize was that they had been studying the world around them since childhood, assessing color, form and pattern for images that are meaningful to them.

I’m just the lucky one who gets to help them realize how much they already know!

Here are a few of the many successes in the class.

The influence of Dr. Who is clearly there!

This sky reminds me of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

This is a Fire lizard from Eastern Europe, but each of the yellow spots is a symbol for something very important in this biology student’s life.