Abstract Watercolor

11 year old

"Seabird"

I am in love with this abstract watercolor created by one of my students.

I wanted to have her create a work focused on the negative space using organic shape.

I pulled some coral and anemone reference for her to look at to find a shape she liked and she gravitated to a picture of fan coral.

After choosing a color palette, she got started.

I'm not going to lie, she was hating this piece for probably the first 15 minutes or so and I encouraged her to keep the faith.  There was a method to my madness, even when it was very hard to see.

She first washed a very light color over the entire paper.  She even added a little salt. Then we dried it with the blowdryer and she lightly penciled in her organic shape.

Then using just a slightly darker shade of her original wash, she painted the paper up to the outside line of her shape.

Dried it again. Lightly penciled the same shape a bit larger and repeated the process. Each time changing the color slightly within her chosen palette.

I'm guessing it wasn't until she was 5 shapes in that her attitude changed towards the positive in regards to the project. Then as it really started coming together, she fell more and more in love with the work.

I thought we were done but then she saw this abstract bird image in the piece that she fell in love with and so I gave her a very fine point coptic pen and told her to loosely trace it in, going around her lines at least three times.

Since the work started off inspired by fan coral, she decided to call the artwork "Seabird"

Simply stunning. I'm so glad she kept the faith through the first stages.