Watercolor Crafternoon

Despite of the Typhoon Mario and low pressure area which have flooded our house, I still attended Alessa Lanot’s (Life After Breakfast) Sunday Basic Watercolor Workshop at Fully Booked, BGC. The workshop is my fiancé’s advance birthday gift for me and I was lucky to avail her limited slot. Unlike with the previous Calligraphy workshop, I already have basic know-hows for watercolor painting. 

The workshop fee is Php1,750 which includes watercolor materials: 4 brushes, 18 color Sakura Koi pan set, 4 sheets of small water color cards, Pencil and eraser.

The workshop started with Watercolor basics presented in power point presentation. I’ll try to share it on detail. First she discussed about different types of watercolor materials from the paint to the brush itself. 

Alessa discussing the color pallets of Sakura Koi Pan Set

Her explanation about how important is the color wheel is very helpful specially for picking the right color combination in harmonizing everything. She also discussed proper handling of paint brush when you want to be in control. 

She demonstrated to us the basics of watercolor mixtures: weak-tea, tea strength, milk strength and cream strength. The key is placing right amount of water to obtain the shade you want to achieve.

Alessa's actual painting of Orchid

This is Alessa's actual painting of Orchid. She's a natural. She showed us how she paints in detail. Just like the other girls I was so amazed. 

One of my favorite water color techniques is wet-on-wet. We did some flower blobs performing this technique. I'm proud that I did well in this activity. We were asked to choose the flower we wanted to paint for the final activity. I chose Orchids, assuming it will be a lot easier to paint but I failed.

The Hall of Artworks

 
I will say that Life After Breakfast watercolor workshop is a worthwhile experience, especially if you really want to know the basics of watercolor medium. It’s different when you actually see it in actual application compared to just watching youtube tutorials. Although in my case, I find the Php1,750 workshop fee a bit pricey for a four hours’ workshop which is quite short. I would love if we had more practice sets and some concise handouts to thinker on. 

If you don’t have budget there are quite number of watercolor tutorials in youtube and some you will find in pinterest.

Satisfying my Instiable Obession with Typography

My undying love for art plus the wedding preps gave me this insatiable obsession with Typography and Watercolor. My fixation with instagram and pinterest post landed me to TYPE KITA. It’s a group holding different kind of art activities such as calligraphy and all sorts of lettering workshops.

Unfortunately, most of their workshops are fully booked. So again, my obsession didn’t stop there. I discovered Alessa Lanot’s (Life After Breakfast) Workshops.

I got torn between watercolor lettering and calligraphy, but for a change and a more challenging craft I signed up in her August 10 calligraphy class held at Pino Restaurant in Teacher’s Village Quezon City.

We started of introducing ourselves. There were about 10 of us who attended the class. Good thing most were first timers.
Alessa introduced herself and how she got inclined with arts. She gave a brief introduction about calligraphy, described each calligraphy supplies, what they are for and shared her dos and don’ts.
She shared the three basic rules, which I pretty suck at:

1. The pressure is always in the downstroke
2. Break down your strokes
3. Space evenly

One of the do’s is proper handling of the pen holder and paper placement. It’s important to angle or slightly rotate the paper.

 

 Inside her goody envelope is Steel Quill Nib Set (5 pcs of nibs), 2 nib holder (straight and oblique), calligraphy hand outs and 1 Dr. PH Martin’s Bombay India ink (color of your choice).

Aside from the free stuffs, we got a heavy vegan meal too!

We started with the basic strokes. My first try is pretty messed up :) Good thing Alessa is moving around, checking our progress. She demonstrated how speed and strokes affects our calligraphy.

At the end part of the workshop we were asked to write a saying using our new calligraphy skills.

Our calligraphy pasted on the wall

Apologies for my first phrasal calligraphy. I attempted to do some flourishing which looked awful.

If I were to rate the whole calligraphy experience, it was surely fun. The experience literally taught me of patience, control and focus. Just to set expectation low, calligraphy is not learned overnight or over 3 hours workshop not unless your a natural. However, the workshop is a nice baby step because you get to see the whole process in action.
Should you be interested with Life after Breakfast you can check her workshop schedules at:

http://lifeafterbreakfast.ph/