How do you describe the colors of a season?
Botanical Art in Watercolor – Fall Foliage
Zoom Online class participants will receive a Zoom link for the live class two hours before the class begins.
$30 Non-Member / $24 Member
Materials not included in the price of the class. See list of materials needed below description.
This class is a great introduction to watercolor techniques for botanical art. We will explore Fall Foliage through a unique medium that has been used by artists and illustrators throughout the years. When the seasons change into fall, depending on where you live, leaves from trees and shrubs will transform into a variety of beautiful colors such as yellow, orange, and red! In the first 20 min of the workshop, we will explore basic watercolor techniques to get us warmed up. The remaining portion of the class will be focused on using watercolor to recreate our autumn muse.
Main Concepts:
- Basics in watercolor color application & techniques
- Explore organic shapes and line contour
Materials Needed:
- 2H or 4H, & HB pencil, eraser (Streader), kneaded eraser & ruler
- 140lb 9”x12” Cold press watercolor paper
- Watercolor – Main ones used in this class: Winsor & Newton-cadmium pale yellow, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, burnt umber, black ivory, Cadmium pale hue red, cadmium deep hue red, alizarin crimson (optional addition -ultramarine blue) *Any brands and substitutions of colors work.
- Colored Pencils – Verithin Prisma color pencils work best – small set works
- Brushes: # 3, #4 #6 Long Round brushes, #3 or #5 Synthetic inexpensive brush for mixing
- 2 water jars/cups, towel, or paper towel
- Mixing palette
- Photo of autumn leaves
- Optional – Small spray bottle or eye dropper
- Optional before workshop – tracing options: Tracing paper, light box or bright window to transfer subject to watercolor paper
Adela Antoinette
Adela Antoinette (She/Her) is a published illustrator, designer and makeup artist. As a southwest born desert dweller, Antoinette’s work primarily centers on Sonoran Desert flora but fluctuates within botany through visiting different regions across the states. She specializes in various traditional mediums including her favorite, watercolor in which she has taught in workshops and classes at the Denali Education Center and The Drawing Studio. Her work has been displayed in various galleries in Arizona, Alaska, and California. Antoinette studied illustration and design at the University of Arizona, receiving her degree in Visual Communication. She is a Tucson, Arizona artist currently living in New York City.
No refund will be issued less than 15 days prior to any Community Class. A $10 cancellation fee will be applied to all refunds. No refunds will be issued for special events.
We reserve the right to cancel Community Classes due to insufficient registration, garden closure, or inclement weather, in which case, participants will receive a full refund. People with disabilities should make requests for accommodation as early as possible to allow time to make appropriate arrangements.
Visual Fall Colors List
The visual colors of fall are as it sounds. They are the colors that you see.
Between visual and emotional colors, visual is definitely the easier one to categorize because it is much more objective.
Let’s get right into it!
Reds
Of all the visual colors, the reds are by far the most prominent. They are pioneered each and every year by trees everywhere. The reds are the warmest of all the colors. They are the most emotionally intense and demand a call to action. Each of them are rich and dark. They include:
Yellows
Yellows are the happiest of all the colors. They spark joy and glee in everyone and tend to just lighten the mood in general. Like the reds, yellow gains popularity from the trees, but the yellows also make an appearance in food like corn. Some colors in the yellow category are:
- Gamboge
- lurid
Oranges
Orange is a very comfortable color. It gives the happiness of yellow and the warmth of red. It is seen in pumpkins, the sunset, the tips of flames, and of course, the trees. Colors in the autumn orange family include:
Browns
Brown is a wonderful family of colors largely because is makes us think of our family. Every person has a skin color that is one shade of brown or another. Brown is everywhere. It’s the dirt we walk on so we don’t endlessly fall, the wood we use to build homes, tables, and chairs, or the fire wood for burning, and the stone floors, walls, and counters. Brown makes us think of structure, safety, and security. Fall browns include:
Gold
Gold is an iconic fall color, reminding us of ripe fields of golden wheat ready for harvest. As a cousin of the colors yellow and brown, gold is more grounded while also stimulating happiness. Gold is a mix between yellow and brown and therefore, it gets its own category. The most common types of golds in the fall season tend to be mellow to dark golds such as:
Purple
Purple is a relaxing and soothing color that stimulates thought and generates new ideas. This color pioneers creative thinking and lets the mind wander in a more relaxed and care free way. Purple is typically a naturally deep and rich color. In fall time, that grows exponentially. Only the richest purples are seen during the autumn season, but they can sometimes be difficult to find. Different types of fall purples are:
Greens
Between the harvesting of an outrageous amount of food and the evergreens that stay their true color, there is plenty of greens to go around. Green is a color that lands right between logical thinking and emotional feelings which makes it a very balanced color. Among the greens are:
Dusty Pink
Dusty pink is a rather specific color. It’s not the bright vibrant pink that people see on little girl’s dresses, or the hot pink that find’s itself on glitter stickers. Rather, it’s a soft blush on the twilight sky of a chilly October’s night. Or it’s even caught by a keen eye on a leaf attached to a humble tree. It’s not bright and bold like some of the yellows and oranges, and it’s not as excited as red. Instead, it is much more compassionate, caring, and hopeful. If we want to broaden this color to soft pinks, it would include:
Emotional Fall Colors List
Emotional colors are interesting because there is no clear-cut right answer. They actually conflict quite a bit with each other. There is the difference between warm and cold, happy and scared. These colors are good representations of these contrary feelings.
Pale Blues
In the fall, the sky can sometimes seem more pale. This can be more of a visual color if focused on this aspect, but there’s another faucet to look at. The temperature drops and the weather becomes much more harsh. This feeling of cold and chilly causes people to think of the fading blues of ice and grey skies. Pales blues can be:
Black
Black, similar to blue, can be a visual color because night comes sooner and there are crows, but it also has a much larger impact as an emotional color. Black isn’t really a color. In fact, it is the absence of light which, in turn, makes it the absence of any color. This also means that it is void of happiness. That being said, it should technically be in the shades category, but it finds its way here due to its emotional relevance. In autumn, there is Halloween, cooling temperatures, and dying plants. Black is brought by fear. Specifically, fear of death. Black is the perfect color to put people on edge.
Dark Browns
Dark browns, while in the visual category, also hold a place here in the emotional colors. Brown can support black in creating dread and darkening the whole mood which extends the most unsavory feeling of coldness and death brought by black. However, when used correctly, brown can be a direct opposite to black by inspiring comfort and security. With brown, its effect directly correlates with its application.
Oranges
Oranges get a relisting because it can heavily support the comfort of brown. Between bon fires and beautiful sunsets, orange only makes people feel warm and relaxed inside. It also brings a sense of joy and love because it can feel like a warm hug. Some of those oranges are:
Reds
Red can do so many things. It can create negative emotions like fear or anger as it relates to blood. It can inspire love and passion as red heightens attraction. It can provide a more intense version of orange’s comfort expressing warmth and dramatic sunsets. It is among the most versatile of colors. Reds include:
Fall Shades List
When used in the context of a color, referring to its shade is a way of describing how light or dark that color is. (E.g. dark red or light blue.) However, if it is not referring to a color, then the de facto is that it is referring to whites, blacks, and grays.
The main autumn shades are dark grays and blacks.
Whites and light grays are typically found has highlights. Whereas blacks and dark grays usually provide depth, definition, and shading.
White
White is often the reflection of light off of a surface. It’s not a common shade in the way of fall. If fall, white is more of a tool rather than a show piece. It can bring importance to something or bring objects to the foreground.
Black
Black is a far more common shade than white. It adds a lot of depth and perspective. It provides shading and is a wonderful tool when trying to convey seriousness, fear, or death. Black is used as a means of control. It controls the feeling, the shape, and importance of an object.
Grays
This is where things get really interesting. Grays are where things really start to get character. A gray is a mixture of white and black. This means that there are an infinite number of different grays that can be created, but the human eye can only see about 30 of them. Grays are most interesting when you consider that they can represent any color. Because of our understanding of the world we live in, our brains tend to associate different colors with different objects, shapes, and shades of gray. This is especially useful for black and white photos because our brain ends up doing all of the work for us so that we can imagine a color there. Some good grays to use are:
Autumn Leaf With Rain Drops In Graphite
My husband and I wanted to go for a drive to see the leaves changing color this year. We were going to load up the dog, head off to a park, and make a day of it, but it kept raining through the peak of the season. So, to celebrate our very wet autumn I drew this leaf with rain drops.
Brush Blended
I used my brush blended technique to draw this leaf, which means I brushed each hatch layer with a small brush. It was a good technique for drawing this leaf’s smooth texture and shiny water drops. I used Arches hotpress watercolor paper and Grafwood pencils because they both work well with this technique.
The First Values
I started by hatching and brushing the values of the leaf around most of the water drops. However, I did brush blend over some of the closely clustered drops so I could get an even looking value on the body of the leaf between them. Graphite smudged with a brush lifts easily with a kneaded eraser, so it was an easy fix later on.
Drawing Water Drops
I drew the water drops by drawing around their brightest highlights as you see them here because I misplaced my beloved Sakura electric eraser! The Sakura spins a nib that allows me to erase pin point details.
The shadows cast by the drops give them height, and their body values give them the luminescent quality of water. The drops also magnify whatever they are sitting on, so veins in the leaf become very large and distorted when they run under a drop.
Water drops are always unique, even if they are in the same light and on the same surface, so there is no set formula for drawing them, but the right tools do help.
Each water drop contains a mix of hard and soft edges. To draw those edges, I used hatching with sharp pointed pencils, some brushing with a small brush, and a wedge-shaped rubber tool (called a Kemper Wipe-out Tool) to gently erase tiny soft highlights.
Finished Leaf, But Not Without Trouble
After I drew the shadows under my leaf, I was horrified to realize that I’d drawn the leaf’s values too lightly. So I put the drawing away for a while as I contemplated taking up rock climbing.
After several days, I decided rock climbing, while creative and bold, wasn’t for me and I had nothing to lose by trying to redraw the leaf around the water drops. After a few days of work, the leaf you see here is what I ended up with. I thought I’d scanned the lighter leaf, but I must have forgotten to do that in my bad mood. You’ll just have to take my word for it, this version is better!
My Sad Eraser Story
Having come to grips with my good Sakura electric eraser flying the coop, I bought a similar looking one for under ten bucks made by Ohuhu! The exclamation mark on that sentence is there because the Sakura cost forty dollars. I was able to add the highlights to my water drops with it, but it wasn’t easy.
After using the Ohuhu eraser, I can say that the nibs don’t keep a point as well as the Sakura eraser nibs do. Also, the Ohuhu nibs are made of a softer material that can smear the graphite. I have a smear on this drawing that I can’t remove, so I’m very disappointed in the Ohuhu eraser. Finally, the nibs aren’t interchangeable, so I’m setting out eraser food every night in hope that my Sakura will come home someday.
Keep drawing everyone, and keep track of your erasers!
Carol
