'Blob' Crowds!

We have just begun a figurative unit in my Wednesday watermedia classes, so I thought I would post an exercise I gave them, in case you wanted to try it out yourselves. We began the unit with incidental figures -the figures that populate a landscape to give it a sense of scale or to make it feel 'lived in'. There are a few great videos online on how to paint these little characters here and here. We began by just painting silhouettes of people doing things, then progressed to dressing them. Then it was time to group them together so that they didn't look so isolated from each other and self-important.

I made a multi-coloured blob with watercolour on small pieces of leftover watercolour paper. These are about 4 x 5" in size. Then the chore was to find a crowd of people in all that colour! I lifted areas of colour, added legs and costumes, did lots of negative painting and then found more people in that. The first photo shows a less refined stage of the process, so you can get the idea (I hope!). Sometimes I just have fun beginning a painting just this way, with a doodle, finding the characters and then building them a stage on which to tell their story. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes not so great, but it is always a fun adventure!

I spent most of this last week doing a complete overhaul of all the images on my website, and updating all my class and workshop information. Hope you like it, it was a huge undertaking. Don't ask me why I don't do it more often!!