I really enjoyed this exercise. I learned how to mix colors and handle the moisture issue I always have with too much water. I still can't seem to get the detail I want, but it will take a lot of practice. My columbine came out ok, but the leaves were a bit wonky--too heavy an outline rather that a thin edging of maroon. 

I have never seriously used watercolors before other than as a kid.  I've never felt like I had a good eye for color so I felt a bit intimidated getting started.  It was easier than I thought, I think because I got so involved in the process - studying my subject and then playing with the mix of colors.  I really wanted to focus on the birds that have returned to my backyard this spring.  The weather has been so terrible the last few days that they mostly disappeared, so I just looked their pictures up on the Cornell website.  I was pleased with the colors I ended up with, though I wasn't so sure about them at the time.  Knowing where to start was a challenge, that is, I wondered about which initial color to use and whether to start light or dark and go from there.  Focusing so closely on the colors made me realize that there was a relationship between the colors in the palette.  For example, I started with my brightest color and then worked on the more muted colors, and as I did this I found that I wanted to add the color I had previously created to the color I was creating as it was closer to what I needed than what was in the paint set.  Nature had a plan for these birds, I guess!

I found this to be harder than I expected. I had trouble regulating the amount of water that was going into the paint. I found the beak of the bird color to be the hardest to mix because it isn't a bright yellow, but when I would put in darker colors, it was easy to overpower the yellow and I would start over again. I can see how experience makes this easier! 

I've been painting and exploring with watercolor for a the past five years, beginner level. Watercolor is fun, but not easy to paint with. Yet, I'm learning so much through this course, I found it easy to mix and experiment. I created a color pallet for my pansies, which I bought a week ago so as to paint them.. I didn't think of creating a pallet though! Now I did. It is more fun and the colors pop out when I create a pallet. I noticed the brightness of colors, Also, I  noticed the same color has tints, tones and shade. This made it easy to paint the subject. Some colors relate  to each other. The color theory make is so visible for me. This was an amazing experience. Below the experimentation I did with colors, tint, tone and shade. The pallet of colors.    

This is my first experience with watercolours.  It's not as difficult as I thought but I find that my colours are fading a bit after they dry.  I am using my children's dollar store watercolours so perhaps I need to upgrade.

This is my first experience with water colors and am looking forward to playing with tine, tone, and shades. My biggest challenge is getting the water amount right as I seem to be putting in too much and my paint is very runny. I am impressed and overwhelmed with the pictures posted to this group.

This is not my first watercolor experience at all. I took a watercolor class during my Master's degree in drawing/(oil) painting, BUT that was 40 years ago! So, this is great review. I ran into trouble, though, because the set I ordered did not have black....but found some in a tube to use. I can see some of the colors looked good while mixing but needed some tweaking. For example, the cloud color should be a little more blue and the mountains should be more neutral. The scanning seems to be a problem for colors sometimes because the orange trees look purple-grey on the scan but look orange on my original paper. But it feels great to be doing watercolors again and I look forward to doing a watercolor bird!

Here is my attempt at a watercolor of a white-throated sparrow based on a photo.  Still too cold here to do anything outside.  I have played around with watercolors a little in the past. I do find it difficult, but I was relatively happy with the colors here.  Doing the legs and feet with watercolors was the most challenging part of this. H

This is My first time with watercolors but have taken a class in oils years ago. My biggest challenge is applying white to the eye of birds -the underneath and the reflective dot in the pupil. Oils allow you to just paint over after it has dried. Maybe I need to relax the finished product.

I decided to use watercolors with an Iceland Poppy growing in the garden. I have very little experience with watercolors. It was difficult for me to create depth and detail with watercolors (vs. line drawings). I felt I was able to get some color variation with the petals but the challenge I wasn't up for was using watercolors on the glass vase. Question: how to use watercolors with transparency.

I usually work in acrylics and have only played around with water colors - its so much harder! Mixing colors is challenging but I think just requires more practice. I found it hard to keep the water from shrinking back into a droplet rather then spreading into a larger amount, if I add more water it washes out, so it requires a lot more color from the palette than you think. The amount of brush washing is more than you think as well. You touch a color every few seconds, and you need to wash out the old before adding more of another. just a lot more steps than you would think. But overall its been fun to experiment and I think just requires more practice!

Previous image could not get the rose color right.

I’m used to using acrylic paints. I tend to over work watercolor instead of relaxing and let it flow. I will improve with practice. I hope. 

So far from perfect, but I really enjoyed this after being intimidated by it a bit haha.  I've never worked with watercolor before now.  I decided to just dive in and do a quick 10-15 minute watercolor only "sketch" of this (no pencils).  What I loved most about this is that in that short amount of time it gave me the confidence to feel comfortable trying this in the field.  The watercolor can be almost as quick as sketching it seems if I don't overthink it when I want to record what I'm seeing quickly out in the field.  I like that it's a way to quickly get colors down on the paper and add notes to id later.  I'm looking forward to experimenting more with this.

I'm really impressed with everyone's work. So far I hate watercolor. I really don't understand color theory and I can't seem to *see* color the way I can see to draw. I feel like the color mixing lesson went really quickly and I don't have enough information to move forward. I'm really frustrated. Because I'm frustrated, it's also really hard to get myself to try. Just sit down and try. It's a rough combo. Trying to push myself to work through it.

Not my first experience but haven't used them in years. In the scene I couldn't get that bright blue sky, mine was more muddy. The orange and yellow and greens are harder to copy. The greys are easier to mix as I have Payne's grey. It mixes and gave me some colours for the browns on the rosy finch. I didn't have too much trouble with the pink using grey and white and rose madder. 

Long ago I used watercolors but not much.  This class is very helpful!    I have a hard time seeing difference between Tone and Shading mixtures.

Very cool. I did have to order and ship another KOI watercolors box because my first one too did not have black, gray, or white.

Below are some of my experiments with the colours in the KOI set, I never really understood the colour wheel and mixing before!  Its definately challenging to mix colours, and add ones you wouldn't expect.  I really concentrate on what I'm seeing and notice, for example, the orange in the trees are actually orange, some are red, depending on the light and shadows etc.

Hidden Grey-green gator  🐊   in the rushes at edge of marsh. He’s between the two images on lower right — barely even visible. I had to use colors to make him at least slightly visible in my journal — best I could do with colors and still make the point.

First watercolor ever!! Pretty Exciting.....did procrastinate for a couple of weeks before tackling but was actually quite fun!