Watercolor - Not my strong point

Below you'll find the two most recent assignments from my watercolor and gouache class + one in-class painting  from today. The two homework assignments are each 100% watercolor and three hours of work, timed fairly accurately. This week in class we started trying to combing watercolor and gouache within the same painting...which turned out to be a massive disaster for me and many others in the class. I'm too ashamed to post the other three paintings I made in class, and look forward to burning them at the end of the semester with great enthusiasm.

You can't see, but he is cleaning a knife on his apron. Assassin.

Assignmetn: shiny and/or reflective objects

A small flame of hope burned in my heart - that I would be able to make paintings that don't completely suck. But then I made the painting after this one and that flame was extinguished forever.

Watercolour and Gouache - The Class

This semester, one of my three studios is Watercolour and Gouache, taught by the unforgettable Lenny Long (I had Lenny for sophomore drawing as well). It's a primarily technical class from the looks of it - which is good because I have pretty poor technical skills in both of these mediums. Actually, I have basically zero experience with normal watercolours. I've only worked with watercolour gouache / opaque watercolours in the past, and I'm finding that the real stuff is a completely different animal. So this will definitely be a big challenge for me to develop my painting skills in a direction I haven't really explored yet.

The first week was gouache only, and we did several 40-minute still lifes in class, with the requirement that they must contain an (imagined) figure. Mine were pretty terrible. Here's an example.

Oh dear.

The homework was two still lifes of three hours each. First was a self portrait with 10+ objects, second was just an assortment of textures on 10+ objects, on colored paper with 10% of the paper showing through. This also didn't go as I'd hoped. But no complete failures.

Looks like me.

I only had red paper! Agh!

And finally, we're up to today, where we began with watercolours. Lenny was missing from class today, so we all winged it in our in-class paintings. Watercolour is HARD. But I managed to make a few 1 hour paintings that didn't make me want to transfer to a liberal arts college.

"I wish I could get out of this putrid cup..."

Some days you ride the duck, some days the duck rides you...

Expect more soon! (getting kicked out of lab)