Watercolor Halloween Pumpkins

I had hoped to have this finished today to wish everyone a happy halloween but it will have to be a Happy Halloween with a work in progress photo.

Watercolor on quarter sheet watercolor paper

Ok, finished now.

Night Watercolor Study

Just a quick demonstration/study I did for the class today to show what you can do with night.

The lit gas station, dark against darks, highlighted roads, silhouettes...

I will definitely do more of these on bigger paper.

The students had many references to choose from. 

You can see some of the photos they had to choose from here.

http://mklart.blogspot.com/p/homework.html

watercolor on 5x14 inch paper

Tissue Paper Watercolor Texture Sunflower Painting

We needed to loosen up in my adult watercolor class so we did some very loose sunflower under paintings on quarter sheet watercolor paper. Then took some tissue paper and 50% water/mod podge mixture to glue the tissue (some use rice paper) paper down controlling the wrinkles. Then painted over the dried tissue paper with washes and color letting drips and the color settle where it wanted to. It is hard to let go sometimes and just let it happen. We were feeling the sunflowers, not painting details. Does that make sense? A good lesson.

Below is the Heinz factory in Pittsburgh that I used this technique on from a while ago.