Art Room Britt: Watercolor Whales

Michelle Fleur

For our final project of the school year I wanted to do something that combined different elements of the learning we explored this last year. When I discovered the gorgeous watercolor whales and marine life of the Australian artist Michelle Fleur, I was instantly hooked. I knew that a watercolor whale project would ask my students to rehash and reawaken their learning, since it incorporates observational drawing, illustration, and watercolor techniques - all areas we explored in the fall semester. And it's a relatively quick project, meaning we could wrap it up in 1-2 classes, just in time for summer.

Last but not least, something about these ethereal, light watercolors reminds me of summer .... maybe the ocean aspect? Maybe the soft, delicateness of watercolor itself?
Who knows. But it certainly fit the bill.

As always, I do a few 'teacher samples' before doing projects with my students. This helps me work out the kinks, anticipate potential problem areas, and assess appropriate paper and media. We used watercolor paper and tube watercolors. Tube watercolors are heavily pigmented and a teeny bit goes a long way. I gave students a palette of 2 blues, green, purple and black, about a 1/4 pea size of each color, and it was more than enough. We taped the border of our paper with artist tape.

Teacher Sample

To begin, we looked at the work of Michelle Fleur and noted the texture, soft shifts in value, and the line work. We noted the light spots, and areas of her whales where there seems to be 'almost' an absence of color. We discussed the importance of working with see-through pigments, and gradually going darker when using watercolor. Key word: WATER color.... so lots of water to start, then gradually painting with more pigment and less water to achieve those darker values.

Practice

Practicing texture and values in watercolor

Each student was given a strip of watercolor paper. We drew 5-6 boxes on this strip, and in each box, following my lead, we explored watercolor techniques. Wet-on-wet, layering dry on wet, softening hard edges, going from dark to light, building up layers. Then we explored tricks to pull up the watercolor paint and reveal white: dabbing with a tissue, salt, alcohol spritz. We discussed brush work: instead of scrubbing the paint brush back and forth, which will overwork your pigment, soak and destroy your paper, we explored dabbing a paint-loaded brush on our wet paper (with a round brush, on a wet-on-wet surface) and then 'leaving it alone' to do it's thing (blend and bleed). This allows for the white of the paper or the lightest areas to stay intact, and will give you that light, airy, etherial and textured quality. This was hard for some students. Students will often overwork the paint with watercolor, scrubbing until their paper is raw, and creating a flat, even-toned application of paint with little to no variation in value. Students had to be encouraged to let the watercolor do it's thing, while still controlling the medium to achieve our goal: soft gradations in value, no hard lines, lightness (unpainted, or barely painted areas) and values dark enough to create contrast and dimension. Not an easy task.

Drawing
I provided students with many photographs of whales, and had students choose one. Our goal was to paint an original whale, drawing from a photograph, while being inspired by the watercolor technique and style of Michelle Fleur. So, each student had a photograph of a whale AND a Michelle Fleur painting of a whale at their seat to reference throughout.

Students drew their whale by close observation. As always with observational drawing exercises, I will do my own 'talking out loud' demo on the white board, so students can see and hear how I asses the line, size, placement and shape of my drawing. The most important thing is to have student fill their paper with their whale. No teeny little whales floating in the middle of a big paper allowed! Students had to fill the full frame of their paper with their whale. To do this, I had students place a dot on one end of the paper where the tail end of the whale is, and then place a dot on the other side of the paper where the front end of the whale is. Then, they assess the girth with back arch and underbelly arch (placing a dot at the point where these are at their fullest). Then they essentially connect the dots. After the basic shape and full size of the whale is drawn, they refine and correct the shape of their whale, by closely observing their reference photo, and then add in details like fins, eyes, mouth etc.

Painting
We started from light to dark and used the wet-on-wet technique to apply our color. Students had to be encouraged to not overwork their color and not to scrub their paper too much with their brush. We dabbed the color on with our brush, moved it around a little bit with light dabs of our brush, but otherwise we tried to let the color flow and bleed into each other. We worked section by section, so the upper half of our whale first, then the lower half of our whale, and lastly the fins. We kept dabbing on paint in blues, greens, purples, and blue-greens, blue-purples. We left areas unpainted for our lightest and white values. We concentrated our darker colors where our whale is darkest. For a darker color we mixed blues with a bit of black, and we also used more pigment and less water. Our goal was to create soft and subtle shifts in value, to create that natural 3D form of the whale.
The hardest part was to convince students that they still needed to go darker. Many were afraid to 'mess up' their whale if they kept adding more color, but once they added their darkest blue-black value, and created a soft blend into the adjacent value, they could see the whale coming together in a 3D way.
Throughout the painting process, we occasionally sprinkled salt or spritzed alcohol on our whales for texture and light. We also blotted with a tightly pinched tissue to pull up some paint and get some of those light spots and lightest values. We occasionally blow dried our whale so we could add additional layers of color and add detail without having the colors bleed together.

Day 1

Finishing Touches
Once painted, we dried thoroughly. Then we added some fine detail using a very fine detail brush, with white and black paint White gel pen and a thin permanent marker were also used for fine detail like mouths, eyes, barnacle dots and dashes and some contouring for emphasis or constast, like where the fin connects to the body.

Background
The background was painted using a wet-on-wet technique using 2-3 of the same colors we had on our palette. Backgrounds should be lighter in value than the whale, for emphasis. Again, we added texture using tissue blotting, salt and alcohol.

Last but not least, our border tape was removed to reveal a beautifully crisp and clean border. We love how the white border contains and frames our painting.