Watercolor Session with Arlene Sy!

I love watercolor. It's so much fun, and I really think I'm getting into the groove of my own style. On a whim, I decided to attend a watercolor workshop by Arlene Sy, whose work I have long admired. Any painter who paints as beautifully as she does, I really wanted to learn from. Thankfully her class with ArtWhale had a slot open, so I joined!

Painting without a drawing, and adding our own elements! GAH

One of the fun things about this workshop is that we only used four colors from our palette! If you don't count opera rose, a bright, flourescent-y pink, we only used the primary colors! Amaaaazing. I was forever mixing up greens, oranges and browns. Arlene walked us through swatching the colors you have to create new shades and hues of the same color. I just learned about mixing complementary colors to create unique shades, and I think the workshop really helped integrate that into my flowery paintings. 

Arlene's style is 100% more loose than mine. She does this thing where she just swipes the brush onto the paper so perfectly to for the shapes, then just layers and layers the paint on the paper. That was amazing to watch, and really hard to follow! I'm more used to precise painting, choosing the colors exactly. 

Then we did this thing where we glazed red/yellow green over the rose to make the painting cohesive. It was pretty. And I think I need to work on my leaves. 

The aftermath! Arlene gave everyone a print of her hydrangeas, and the moment I got home, I experimented right away. More, give me moooore to experiment with!