Venice Watercolour

Another great painting day this week

Yesterday we held a Venice Watercolour class, it's always been a popular subject over the years.  Click on the links below for past years' work.

2017

2011

2010

Claire demonstrates in a step by step style, explaining the layout, the paints required and helps everyone throughout the day.

She was delighted with everyone's drawings yesterday

Our days are always great fun, especially yesterday with the naming of our gondolier Giovanni!

Below is our gallery of Venice ....

At the end of the day, Claire mounts the artwork and we have an exhibition, it's always amazing to see everyone's different version of the painting.

We enjoyed a lunch of salmon, goats cheese & basil, served with sesame broccoli and this superfood salad of rice, red rice, black rice, wild rice (!) red and white quinoa, with mixed herbs and veg.

Followed by a delicious apple crumble

Venice Watercolour

On a beautiful day last week our artists (and Bambi) joined us for a Watercolour Class.

The subject was Venice, a place we have painted some years ago.

previous Venice classes

Claire used the lovely Saunders Waterford heavyweight paper, perfect to keep the transparency in this lovely painting's shadows, reflections and glazing.

The class started with 'vanishing point' exercises, which were needed for drawing in the buildings.

Below are the finished works of art ....

Venice Watercolour 10 November 2011

We held another Venice Watercolour class today, it's always a popular subject.

We used a different image today, and worked in a new palette of colours and really worked on our tonal values.

We did a small amount of drawing at the beginning, working out the outlines of the buildings behind, so iconic and famous we had to get them right!

Below are the finished paintings:

Simply Venice Watercolour Class

We had a lovely day yesterday painting our Venice scene. It wasn't as simple as the title suggested! There was quite alot of drawing to start with, to get the important skyline of buildings just right, they create a silhouette that can only be Venice.


Keeping in the watery Venice style, it was a painting that had several washes and we needed a good strong paper to take all the water we were brushing on. Claire had brought some Saunders Waterford paper, which is a very good quality 300lb heavyweight paper and perfect for the technique we were using of very loose washes, very typical of Claire's painting style (and also perfect for when she splashed her painting with the wrong paint, and was able to get it out, a thinner paper would have worn out, we all learnt a very useful technique there!)


We also had two new colours today, which were gorgeous, a green called Viridian, and a purple called Manganese Violet, both of which we used for the Gondolas, they were so vibrant, we had to be quite careful when mixing them up not to make them too strong.

It was a very chilled day, the sun shone, and we heard about two proposal stories from Venice!

We are now breaking for the Easter with Watercolour and will be back on Wednesday 28 April for Sunflowers in Provence, a lovely, big sunny painting.