Boat on water in watercolor

We are going to paint seascape from Venice with gondola, waves, reflections, seagulls and marine atmosphere. 

The author of the course Julia Barminova speaks English on video without subtitles

What is this course about?

This fascinating feeling, when a bit of watercolor paint of different saturation and shade become something bigger on the white paper. 

By having heard the watercolour technique from easy concepts to the hard ones, by painting your own sea, after workshop my students can look at the watercolor sea paintings with the understanding of HOW exactly it is done.

Step by step approach

Even though the majority of my paintings have boats and another port life on them, all my watercolors are about water. Water is the center of everything and the most important and complex object, I always give it all my main attention and draw it first.

If you look closely, you will see that long before the  the boat appears, the whole sea will be painted inside and out. Then I continue - the reflection is the next step, then the boat, its details and the distant plan. This procedure helps me concentrate on the most important thing and to have a luxury of losing attention just a little closer to the end, in order to make the distant plan aerial and the water as real as possible.

The Secret of reflections

To comprehend all the subtleties of the reflection of objects in the water, you need to think about that the water is constantly moving. It changes every second. If you watch reflections dance on the surface, you will notice that although they change, some things are permanent. These are, for example, a change of tone close to the horizon and right in front of you. There are different shades of colors, the relationship between dark and light elements. This is my secret of the image of water – to understand what is constant and what is not. I don’t experiment with what is always there, I try to convey it as it is, and I allow myself to play with moving parts