Molly Hashimoto's Watercolor Travel Journal Demo

Molly Hashimoto was at the Seattle DANIEL SMITH recently for one of our FREE “How To” weekend demos.  She was demonstrating her very popular Watercolor Travel Journal tips and techniques to a packed room, and a VERY interested audience.

 

Molly began keeping Travel Journals in 1998, and told us that: “The time spent drawing in your Journal while looking at your subject is more meaningful than just taking photos – you slow down time this way”.  At the second demo Molly told us that making the Journals helps her to enjoy and extend the experience of her trip because of taking the time to sketch on site and working on finishing later in the studio “…stops time just a little bit…the experience is not over.”  I would like to add that Molly’s blog is also a fascinating Internet “Travel Sketchbook and Journal” of what she is working on, thoughts on painting, her classes and workshops and more, really worth taking some time to read, look at and enjoy!

• Water soluble pen.
• Waterbrush like the Niji Waterbrushes.
• 2 small bottles of water (one for clean and one for dirty) but if you carry several filled waterbrushes then you don’t need these
• Small watercolor brush such as a small travel watercolor brush.
• Winsor & Newton Watercolor Pocket Plus Travel set, although Molly finds it does not work for her with larger sketches, since she can’t do washes not enough surface area from the mini palette in the travel set.

• “Niji waterbrush really helps to loosen up your work. To clean squeeze it and wipe with a paper towel.”
• “I like to carry several waterbrushes.”
• “Best way to start is to come up with a way to do these [sketches] very quickly.”
• Sometimes uses Drafting tape to control her edges, it just depends on the effect Molly wants.
• Molly really likes preserving the white spaces (around the sketch) and negative spaces.
• “Not a studio painting [the sketches] it does not have to be representational.”
• “So many different ways to paint – no right or wrong.”
• Molly does rip out sketches that she does not like
• Molly likes to let things dry when she paints outdoors, and then goes back in and works some more.
• “Tip – use a really fine point pen so that the notes in the journal don’t over power the sketch.” 
• Molly likes really beautiful letter forms in her journals, although doesn’t do it so much any more because it is time consuming.
• Watercolor by itself does not work with calligraphy [for the letter forms]  - not enough “body”, so Molly mixes the WC with white gouache, the “paints” the mix onto her calligraphy nib.

DANIEL SMITH Seattle Store: The Store For Artists

Happy New Year!  Time to get a fresh new perspective on Watercolor!  This weekend at our Seattle DANIEL SMITH Store for our FREE “How To” Art demos, we have two different perspectives on Watercolor:  “The Travel Journal” with Molly Hashimoto and “Debunking the Myth of Talent – Boats, boats, boats!” with Stella Canfield.

Watercolor Artist Tom Hoffmann participated in a FREE Watercolor Demonstration last Saturday, April 19, at our DANIEL SMITH Seattle Store.

Tom talked about his painting philosophy, his creative process, shared with us some of his watercolor “sketches” from his travels in Mexico and painted a watercolor street scene from one of the sketches. It was especially interesting to listen to Tom talk about watercolor painting because one of his street scene paintings is on the cover of our new DANIEL SMITH Summer Sale Catalog.

Some of Toms’ tips for the attendees were that for him it’s about “what not to paint” that painting is a process of editing out everything but the essential visual keys. He later added that he “prefers to leave something for me [the viewer] to add to the piece”.

He also described it as kind of like a horizontal “graph” or timeline….

Tom shared with us how he mixes really rich, “not murky” darks (shadows) in his paintings by mixing DANIEL SMITH Extra Fine Watercolors in Phalo Blue, Quinacridone Red and Quinacridone Gold. In the new DANIEL SMITH Summer Sale Catalog on page 3, Tom talks more about this and other watercolor tips that he has found, definitly worth reading!

The audience was very attentive watching the painting come alive under Toms’ brush and watercolor, it was really amazing to watch it happen.

A couple of other things Tom said that I noted down because I thought they were interesting and motivational were: “The role of the pencil is to allow me to confidently put the paint down”. Darks are the “narrative content, and the forms that are worth looking at”. “I like gorgeous paint more than anything else”. And lastly, “I want people to say: ‘Hell, I can do that!’”

Tom Hoffmann is an instructor atthe Gage Academy of Art and will be offering workshops later this year through DANIEL SMITH, more information to be posted later. The workshops will be an excellent opportunity to learn from a very good instructor.