Watercolor Project

Watercolor is the perfect medium for capturing light and color in nature. The paint is mostly transparent and while the fluid nature of the watercolor makes it unpredictable, the range of effects it can create makes up for it. Watercolor, or aquarelle in French, is used in a series of washes, allowing the light to reflect on the underlying paper. This layering creates a rich and vibrant effect by allowing the colors to be mixed by the viewers eye. This transparency also makes it difficult and sometimes unforgiving to work with. If a mistake occurs, it cannot be simply painted over, although most of it can be lifted off with water. Watercolors first appeared in China and Japan. Watercolor painting is intertwined with the history of paper, invented in China around 100 AD. From then on, both spread. The first primary forms of watercolor painting for the Medieval and Renaissance artists was fresco: painting with water-based pigments on wet plaster (the Sistine Chapel is the most famous, painted from 1508-1512). Albrecht Durer (German, 1471-1528) was traditionally considered to be the first master of watercolor. [The painting of A Young Hare, done by Durer in 1502, is to the top left.] Over the next 250 years, many other artists continued to use watercolor, but mainly as a tool for drawing and developing compositions. The classic style of watercolor painting was developed in England, 18th and 19th centuries with the introduction of high-quality paper. This is when special watercolor paper was designed that would allow the artist to lift the watercolor from the paper and work with it. The watercolor movement was led by the talented watercolorist Joseph M.W. Turner (English, 1775-1851), a great painter from the 19th century. [His Conway Castle, North Wales, is to the bottom right and was finished in 1798.] Some other classic watercolorists are Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and James A.M. Whistler. This historical information was collected and paraphrased from: http://documents.stanford.edu/67/2869. I highly encourage you to click on this, which will allow you to look at watercolor paintings from Winslow Homer, an American artist. This website is the from the National Gallery of Art. It does not just include some of his paintings, but information on him and on every single piece of artwork. I encourage you to look at some of his afterword paintings, not just the ones on that first page. There are 344-but don't worry! You do not have to look at them all.

If you want help/inspiration go to this website!!!