Watercolours!

Watercolours have both the power to relax and frustrate, but despite some minor difficulties, I had a really good time working with them today. I haven't touched my paints since before the start of the semester and it felt really good to use them again. We started off with a classic watercolour exercise, painting geometric solids to show dimension, keeping in mind the direction of light on the object. Once we were a bit more comfortable with that, we moved on to landscapes, using the photos we brought in. I started a painting of what I believe is Lake Geneva, from a photo my parents took in Switzerland. I'll scan that in later.

The point of today's class was to understand how programs like Illustrator and Photoshop evolved from classical art forms; as with watercolours (and other forms of painting), the end result using such programs is achieved by creating successive layers...it works a bit like a puzzle, but with pieces that are laid out behind and in front of each other rather than side by side. Eventually the pieces come together to create the finished picture.

Another point we touched on in class is that art isn't created on the computer (not often anyway); drawing and painting will never be obsolete because we always need to start on paper and get ideas out before we can translate them onto the computer screen. And on that note...I will go back to my sketchbook.