Last weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to South Carolina to teach a Watercolor Collage Workshop of rate Greenwood Artist Guild. One of their members, Dana, had taken some of my classes ten years ago while we lived in South Carolina. When she saw that we had moved to Tennessee she contacted me and asked if I would be interested in teaching a workshop so of course I said yes!
We spent the morning working on a landscape where we first masked out some trees in the background and then painted in our overall color scheme with watercolor. The focus of the workshop was to explore different ways to create texture, both visual and tactile, so we used salt and instant coffee for some visual texture.
Collage was used to create tactile texture so we first painted tissue and rice papers using the color scheme we had already established. After they dried, we collaged them on to the rock areas, painted shadows, collaged some more and ended up with wonderful, real texture in our paintings.
We spent the afternoon painting flowers, using very thin rice paper to create areas of darks and lights in our composition. We also stamped on the rice paper to add more visual interest and used negative painting to pull out the shapes of the flowers and leaves.
It was a wonderful day spent experimenting with the combination of collage and watercolor. Everyone was friendly, creative and hospitable and could not have treated me any better. Thank you Greenwood Artist Guild!
