Hey there, this is Joe. Joe is a home school high schooler. A quiet kid, who loves listening to For King and Country and Crowder. In school, he enjoys participating in science experiments. His favorite ice cream is Cookies and Cream. He also, “really likes being outside and playing in the snow!” Joe is one of my private art students and here we are taking what we have learned about the elements of art and started our first watercolor painting.

When Joe started his art lessons with me this fall he wanted to become skilled at drawing. But looking at his sketchbook I could tell that he was well on his way. He told me that he loved drawing and that he spends some time most days, sketching and drawing. This was wonderful to hear because this meant that he understood that practice was part of the discipline of being an artist.

I decided to see if I might be able to engage this foundational knowledge and try another medium, my favorite, of course, watercolor. This project took us 2 sessions. Learning value, saturation, and color theory while layering our way to a beautiful painting. The following picture doesn’t do his efforts justice! But hopefully you can see he is well on his way. Here we used a wet on wet technique and we only used primary colors to this create this painting at this stage.

Often I have the students do what I call a perspective check. This is where we stand back and look at our work from a distance. This allows our eyes to see our work differently and gives us a chance to course-correct if need be. What was so wonderful was to hear Joe’s response to his own work. “ Wow, that is the best painting I have ever done, whoa!” Now coming from this guy, this was was music to my ears. Here is Joe’s work. I can officially say that I have won him over to watercolor painting!