Watercolour Painting Project

Your first practical studio project in this course is a watercolour painting.

You are required to study neoclassical architecture and its characteristics and choose one of these many (four examples above: The Hockey Hall of fame Yonge and Frint Street, Union Station on Front Street, University College, and Harthouse, both on the University of Toronto Campus, just west of Queens Park)buildings as the inspiration for a watercolour painting. To make it easier for you, I have already taken quite a number of photographs from neoclassical pieces around the city of Toronto, which include a number of buildings from the University of Toronto, The Ontario Legislature, Union Station on front Street, the Hockey Hall of Fame, and various other appropriate pieces. These photos are located on the Mac computer in our room and you are free to choose a piece from this collection and print it out on the printer. See me if you need assistance.

Once you have the image printed. You may need to “grid-up” the image, or part of the image, to a more appropriate size to fit your 15 x 11 watercolor paper. In order to be creative, feel free to render the building in any way you please, but it should be obvious that the piece you've chosen has been the inspiration for the work.

You will be issued a nice piece of watercolor paper for this project, and we will also review the use of watercolor as a medium. There are some small pamphlets on watercolor painting that I have assembled in order to summarize the use of the medium. I will assist you individually, and also make group demonstrations that will help you handle this medium.

To get started, you should do some small thumbnails, and then progress to drawing with pencil on the watercolor paper. Any use of pencil on the watercolor paper should be very light. Try not to touch the paper with greasy hands, because this will affect the application of the watercolor.

Since we have quite a bit of art history to cover it is likely that at least on some days you're painting regimen will be interrupted while we progress with more discussions about our art historical period.