Learning by teaching!

Had an amazing day yesterday thanks to all of you that commented on "Ronnie"....this kind of response is so encouraging and makes anyone want to strive forward and learn more.....

In saying this a friend of mine really wants to get into painting and like everyone finds it hard to get started and looks at everything as "thats too hard" so gets put off. She came round yesterday and has over the last year or so seen my work go from utter rubbish (kept all of those) to what I am doing to date and asked if I could show her some basics. So I did.....and glad that I did, because I learnt so much by doing it.

It showed me the importance of what materials we use and I got her to use one of my favourtie brushes, just to pick up paint and put it down onto paper. Just something simple like a box and see how far she could go with one loaded brush. Then we used one of hers - a cheap brush from a large pack of cheap brushes ie from the £ shop - and did the same exercise and within seconds the brush crumpled and control was lost and did'nt hold as much paint. She learnt so much from that one little thing. And so did I.....do not buy cheap tools.

We went onto form (the good ol apple) tone and shadow. Simple lifting out techniques and that showed alot as she believed that once paint had been laid down, that was it and if a mistake was made, into the bin it would go. She was blown away by the fact that watercolour can be manipulated at any stage after to improve the composition....

Masking fluid was a big one.....she had never heard of it before and was always baffled how some white remained so in the pictures that she has admired...

Another big lesson learnt was the paper used and how that can affect the final result....which I and I guess all of us at some stage have learnt the hard way.....

In doing these simple exercises I realised how much I had learnt in the past and what fun it was to share that knowledge and how valuable it is to do that for someone, as alot of techniques that I have learnt recently have now been passed onto her instead of waiting years to discover them.....whether she puts them to any use or not immediately doesnt matter, as they are there somewhere in her memory banks, together with some great little tutorials from other artists..

4 hours later we finished and we both felt that we had achieved loads, which was special.....
Just thought I'd share.......B