Shapes of Things to be Painted

I teach a weekly watercolor class for beginning adult painters. I love it. I find it a pleasure to help other people discover the enjoyable, meditative experience of applying paint to a piece of paper and making art. Where does one start? We talk about color, brushes, paper, and then we have to dive in and paint. One thing that I have always found helpful is to simplify what you are looking at to paint. One way to do that is to think of the world around us in terms of shapes.
I am currently painting a floral watercolor on canvas. It is all about simple shapes, tulips, lilacs, azaleas.

Our brain sees certain shapes, colors and values and we know it is a tulip or a leaf.

Beauty many times is very simple.

Read more at: Painting.