Watercolor Homework Practicing Wet on Wet Technique

The following watercolors were done from photos on Tom Hoffman's Watercolor Homework blog.
For each of the paintings I started with the sky by wetting the area of the sky with clear water then painting cobalt blue on the wetted page.  Then that was left to dry.  The bottom half was done one of  two ways.  For one painting I just applied a wet base color.  It was the lightest color I was going to use in that area.  The other paintings I actually started the same way I did the sky, with clear water then painting over with my yellows and greens.  The key to avoid blooms is to not re-dip into water.  Be sure that the brush and pigment is drier than the page you are painting on.  Using this technique the water on the paper is the water supply that you use. 

Sky Studies Watercolor Homework

Watercolor homework paintings for  Tom Hoffman's Tuesday class.
The point of the exercise is to see how forgiving painting the sky can be looking for simple shapes and values.  The first painting was done on a very wet paper.  The second had an initial clear wash but it ended up drying on me so you can see hard edges to the clouds. 

Study on Soft Edges in Watercolor

I am taking a watercolor class this spring with Tom Hoffman.  Yesterday we studied how far you can go with soft edges in paintings.  Here is a watercolor done from a photograph of Hawaii.  

The intention of this study was to do a painting all in soft edges to find out what places may need hard edges or if any hard edges are needed at all!  I worked in clear water on both sides of the paper before I started to apply paint strokes with a broad brush.  

Getting Back into Watercolor

I have taken a bit of a hiatus from my watercolor study.  Just pure watercolor.  I become torn with sketching the pen and ink and watercolor way vs pure watercolor on good paper.  With Urban Sketchers, the pen and ink approach seems to be my usual way to go.  But I love the the looseness of a pure watercolor painting... and am not always a success at it.  But I share this as a way of seeing process.  The above watercolor was my first attempt at this particular set up.   I just started painting on dry paper....and forgot about wetting the paper first to get the looser wet on wet look. 

This is the second attempt.  From a photo on the set up done the next evening. Simpler shapes and more direct with color the mandarin orange has more pop.

Third attempt, I wanted to pull the oranges up on the page and start to use more complementary colors to really make that orange pop.

Fourth attempt,  I usually am so literal with color... I just thought I would force myself to change up the color palette but stay true to the values.  This was really wet and lacks in some hard edges but you can still see what is going on.

A Study of a New York Street Scene in Six Views

For water color home work,  I ended up practicing painting a scene from a photograph 6 times.  Each time learning something different.  My goal was to be less literal and more abstract with my watercolors.  See what transpired.

First try at the scene try to capture a complex image and get the lighting but abstracting form. I overworked the darks with too many passes and it looked messy.

Second try on cheap paper.  Quality of the water color was really bad on the inexpensive paper. 

A little better paper and I tried to focus in to reduce the amount of information.  Still too busy. Some things I liked but not completely happy.

I liked the base of this one  but the upper portion I wasn't as happy with.

This one I did after talking to Tom Hoffman about my previous passes.  This was done in about 30 minutes got the major shapes and the feeling of the activity of the street without being literal. 

One more try at home.  Got a little more fussy but not bad.