Realistic Watercolor for Beginners - Free Online Workshop!

Have you seen Kelly Eddington's FREE workshop, Realistic Watercolor for Beginners?

Through online video lessons, Professional Watercolor Artist Kelly Eddington shows us how to approach a multitude of popular watercolor subjects: landscapes, still life, and portraits. Kelly will show you how watercolor’s unique properties can do the heavy lifting in each painting. 

Here's the lineup for Kelly's workshops:

Lesson 1: Card with Spring Landscape  - WATCH HERE
Masking fluid is a watercolor artist’s secret weapon, and we will use it to create a painting of a flowering tree in a spring landscape. And if you would like to paint multiple cards, you’ll see how easy it is to develop variations on this tree to suit your color preferences. Magnolia? Red bud? Apple? Forsythia? The choice is yours.

Lesson 2: Bubble Gum Still Life - WATCH HERE
This workshop is about something many beginning artists don’t consider: reflected light. We’ll learn how colorful objects can influence each other. This effect is surprisingly easy to replicate with wet-into-wet watercolor, and we’ll practice that by painting a few gum balls. We’ll also learn how to create the candy’s shiny surface using masking fluid.

Lesson 3: Practicing Facial Features - WATCH HERE
How do you paint something difficult? It helps if you break it down into small parts and tackle them one at a time. We will practice painting a sheet of individual eyes, noses, and mouths in various positions. Feeling scared? Paint with a single color. Feeling brave? Try full color. It’s the easiest way to dip your artistic big toe into the ocean of portrait painting.

Lesson 4: Limited-Palette Portrait - WATCH HERE
We’ll use skills learned in Week 3’s workshop to paint a limited-palette watercolor portrait using your choice of colors. After drawing a pencil outline of our subject’s main features, we will use masking fluid to establish highlights. Then comes the fun part: we will coat the entire sheet of paper with several analogous colors. Once that is dry, we will work on the features using a darker color. This colorful twist on an old-school exercise is popular for a reason: it makes portrait painting a lot less intimidating.

If you haven’t participated in our workshops before, it's completely free to follow along and watch the videos. After they are released on the workshop website, they'll be available for viewing for the remainder of the year. 

We hope you enjoy the workshops and would love to see what they inspire you to create! Show us on facebook or on Instagram (@strathmoreart) using #StrathmoreWorkshops.