Paper and Threads

In 2003 I purchased Winsor-Newton watercolors in primary colors and Anne Elsworth's book entitled Watercolor Skills Workbook - 10 easy lessons.  However, it wasn't until July 2005 that I partially retired and in September joined EDM.  I'm finally starting to slowly go through the 10 lessons - and doing a few of the exercises and projects.   

Lesson one recommends a basic palette and then outlines exercises to mix secondary and complementary colors.  I mixed Winsor lemon and French ultramarine to make green and then added varying amounts of cad red to mix complemetaries.  These were used to paint houses from a painting by Camille Pisarro (The Hermitage at Pointoise - posted March 13th).

 I'm now posting 2 projects from lesson 2: 

Project 1. Drawing a still life on mirror tiles: I took several items from my china closet and sketched them on a round mirror.  It was fun, but I'm not sure I would know this "busy painting" is because of reflections in a mirror if I didn't know it.

Project 2.  Painting the silhouette of buildings:  This is a painting of the Tower of London rooflines from a photo that I took during our October visit.  I loved doing this project and will probably paint more photos from the series of photos that I took that day!