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Age Range: 8+
Time to Complete: 40 minutes.
Supplies Needed
Watercolors, pan or liquid
Paintbrushes
Round
Flat
Pencil
Water
Masking tape (optional)
Hair Dryer (optional)
1. Tape the borders of your image with masking tape to end up with straight and clean borders to your image. This step is optional.
2. While looking at your intended image, identify the larger shapes and very lightly sketch them onto your paper.
Note: Erasing on watercolor paper can make the surface rough, and uneven. A light sketch will not need erasing.
3. On some scrap paper, test some color combinations that best reflect the colors in your image. Note that adding red to green will make the color darker because these colors are complementary.
5. With watercolor, working from the lightest colors to the darkest colors works best. Establish a base layer of color by using more water than color and painting an even layer of your lightest colors for each section. If you want any section to be white, either paint around it, or immediately dry that section with a paper towel or cotton swab. Let these dry a bit before continuing.
Note: You can speed this process up by using a hair dryer to dry the paper quicker.
6. After your basic colors have dried a bit, add in the bigger shapes. Still sticking to basic colors.
7. Slowly begin building your shadows by making sections darker. This step is still very general. Details will be the last things to be added.
8. Add details to your artwork with a finer brush, like the tree branches and the fence.
9. Remove the tape and sign your painting.
Congratulations! You’ve completed the project.
Stephanie Stockton (1906-2003)
Stephanie Stockton, Nevada City, ca., 1968, watercolor, 15 x 22 inches. BMoA Permanent Collection 2007.02.01. Gift of Stan and Ginnie Eschner, 2007.
Born in Los Angeles in 1906, Stephanie Stockton and her family moved to Bakersfield one year later, attending St. Francis Parish School and Bakersfield College, before enrolling at the renowned Chouinard Art Institute in her early twenties. However, it was her contact with the breakthrough works and pictorial harmony by Georgia O’Keefe, Wassily Kandinsky and John Stuart Curry at the Art Students’ League in New York City that fostered her artistic pursuits towards Regionalism.
The Regionalist style of painting of the 1930s showcased the small towns of rural America, excluding any indication of modern technology and the growing problems of urbanity. Stockton translated the stylings of this movement with expressive color and technique in Nevada City. Limiting abstraction in her piece, Stockton’s depiction of the small Northern California town is uninhibited in her watercolor application, signaling a need to capture the essence of the humble man-made landscape that is at the same time devoid of human presence.
Complementary Colors: colors on opposite sides of the color wheel are called complementary colors because they are complete opposites and mixing them completes the color wheel.
Mixing complementary colors will make darker colors like brown.
For example: red and yellow make orange. The complement to orange is blue. By combining orange and blue, you are combining blue with red and yellow, all of the primary colors on the color wheel.