Watercolor Foundations: Techniques, Skills, and Confidence with Dave Cook (Mondays)

This course introduces and reinforces the core principles of watercolor painting while helping students build technical skill, confidence, and a loose, expressive approach to the medium. Students will develop essential skills in design, composition, color mixing, brushwork, and planning while learning how watercolor behaves and how to use it with clarity and intention. Through instructor demonstrations, guided practice, and individualized feedback, students will strengthen their understanding of watercolor techniques and apply them across a variety of subjects. The emphasis is on developing transferable skills that support all watercolor painting rather than focusing on any single subject. Designed as a progressive foundation course, each session builds on the previous one, helping students steadily develop both technical ability and artistic confidence. Students will leave with a solid foundation for continued watercolor study and a greater ability to plan and complete expressive watercolor paintings.

Dave Cook, an artist and architect, explores the beauty of the created world through vivid, colorful shape-dominated paintings.  His approach to water media painting is varied and explorative; he paints landscapes often with references to buildings and structures as a natural outgrowth of his architectural background.  HIs cityscapes, portraits and animal paintings are expressive studies with dramatic light interplay.  The techniques he employs are often spontaneous with energy and emotion.  He paints somewhere between realism and abstraction, using water media on paper, often using various textures, strokes and effects.  www.dcookart.com/