Notes from Alexis Lavine Demo:

It was a great pleasure to present a watercolor demo on Yupo for you. Here is a re-cap of my process, including several finishing stages.
First, here are my three source photos. I will choose different flowers from all three photos, based on their shapes and colors, and design them all together into one new arrangement.

Starting with a small value study is always helpful to determine the size, placement, and value of all of my positive and negative shapes

Here’s my free-hand drawing on tracing paper, ready to be transferred onto my Yupo.

But - first I painted a cool, dark underpainting onto the Yupo!

Once it was dry, I transferred my drawing on top of the underpainting, using transfer paper. Here’s a close-up view of part of it.

Then, using a dampened, round brush, I easily removed the paint from my positive shapes. Then I drew in some of the details within the interior of the flower shapes.

Here is my demo about halfway through our zoom event. You can see that I finished lifting off the positive shapes and got a good start on describing their colors, values, and textures.

Here is my demo at the end of our time together on Zoom. I started to (gently) glaze darker areas on the positive shapes to define them better. I also showed how I lift off those tiny hairs that make the stems look so soft and fuzzy. Yupo makes this extremely easy!

After a bit more work, the next day, you can see that I described the bowl-like forms of the flowers more clearly, as well as the solid cylindrical shapes of the seed pods.

And for some finishing touches: I lifted off numerous tiny hairs. I spattered on some more touches of warm yellows and oranges into the negative space, to give it a bit more sparkle and to relate it to all of the warm colors in the flowers. And then I spattered some cool blue-greens onto the dark negative space, especially towards the bottom of the painting, to help those stems “melt” into the darkness there.

I hope you find this re-cap to be interesting and helpful.
To learn more about me, my art and my teaching, please visit my website.
Thank you again, TRA, for inviting me to do this for your members! It was a great pleasure and an honor.
Sincerely,
Alexis Lavine, AWS, NWS
Visit my website here:www.alexislavineartist.com
Read about me here: https://www.artsyshark.com/2022/09/15/featured-artist-alexis-lavine