One petal and half a leaf

Yesterday, just before my art class, I arrived back from an very nice long weekend in Tauranga where I was most fortunate to be able to attend a three day watercolour workshop learning from Susan Harrison-Tustain (website). It was a rainy weekend, so good to be inside painting. I feel I've taken a big step forward in learning to paint watercolor.

Back when I first thought to paint, one of the very first books that I bought was Glorious Garden Flowers in Watercolor by Susan Harrison-Tustain. On reading the book I felt quite intimidated by the quality and detail of the painting and the after (very) briefly trying out a few exercises, consigned the book to a shelf, every so often pullingly it out for a browse and longingly wishing I could do something approaching the work therein.

More recently I purchased Susan's two instructional DVDs Susan Harrison-Tustain's One-on-One Watercolor Workshops and Susan Harrison-Tustain's Watercolor Portrait Workshop and I found that the DVDs helped me considerably to understand and use her watercolour techniques. The next logical step then was the workshop.

The result is shown above. One petal and half a leaf. One might have expected to have achieved a little more than this in three days! However I am a slow painter and Susan's techniques are painstaking. There was a lot to learn: how to mix colours, how to put the paint on the paper so that later washes don't move earlier washes, how to use a yellow underpainting to bring out the colour, and so much more. I would have liked more time to paint, that's true, but I am sufficiently pleased that I will be keeping a close eye out for any of her future workshops, and would rather hope to be able to attend her more advanced workshop should she choose to hold one in the future.

In the meantime I will continue painting the rose above - one petal at a time.



So thank you Susan and Richard, and thanks to all the participants, I had a great time, and learned a lot. Tauranga was a lovely town to hold the workshop.