CONNECTED

Building the Painting Without Breaking It Apart

It’s easy to start connected. The skill is staying connected.

There’s a point in almost every watercolor when everything seems to be working. The first washes are fresh, the shapes are broad, and the painting feels unified and full of possibility.

Then comes the hard part.

In Connected: Building the Painting Without Breaking It Apart, we’ll explore how to maintain that sense of unity as the painting develops and becomes more complex.

The first washes, generally painted with thinner pigment, allow us to establish the background and foreground with relative freedom. But once those larger relationships are in place, we arrive at the middle ground—the meat of the painting—where much of the subject, complexity, and visual information needs to be resolved.

This is also where paintings often begin to fall apart.

Buildings become buildings. Trees become trees. Figures, vehicles, boats, shadows, and architectural elements all begin demanding individual attention. Before long, a painting that began as a unified statement can turn into a collection of separate objects and disconnected operations.

In this Masterclass, we’ll work on changing that way of thinking.

Rather than approaching a painting as a sequence of individual things to complete, we’ll learn to see the middle ground as a larger connected shape—one that can contain a tremendous amount of information without sacrificing the unity of the whole.

Through demonstrations and targeted exercises, we’ll explore how to:

• Establish background and foreground while creating a strong foundation for the painting
• Use the first washes to create continuity and larger visual relationships
• Recognize and organize the middle ground as a unified shape
• Introduce stronger pigment and increasing complexity without fragmenting the painting
• Connect values and shapes across individual objects
• Use hard, soft, and lost edges to maintain continuity
• Develop enough information to communicate the subject without over-describing it
• Recognize when additional marks strengthen the painting—and when they begin to break it apart
• Move beyond thinking in separate operations and begin responding to the painting as one continuously developing visual statement

The goal isn’t to eliminate the individual parts of the painting. It’s to make sure they continue to belong to the whole.

As the class progresses, we’ll move from the simplicity and freedom of the first washes into the much more demanding process of developing the middle ground, adding information, and ultimately resolving the painting without sacrificing the freshness and connection that made it work in the first place.

Whether you paint landscapes, city scenes, coastal subjects, or figures, the principles of Connected are designed to help you approach increasingly complex paintings with greater clarity and intention.

Because a strong watercolor isn’t simply a collection of well-painted objects.

It’s one connected visual statement.