Budding Artists Learn to Do a Watercolor Wash at Fuller Library

“I’m a watercolor painter, a mom and a social worker, but today I’m a watercolor painter teacher,” said Pam Santos as she introduced herself to the 12 children at the Watercolor Painting Workshop at the on Wednesday.

The class was a mixture of middle-school-age children sprinkled with a few fifth-graders. They all seemed eager to begin painting but listened attentively as Santos gave directions and talked about the watercolor painting process.

She told the kids an anecdote about learning to draw, how her art teacher kept her drawing pictures over and over again when she really wanted to start painting.

“Before you can do a good watercolor, you need to learn about drawing,” Santos said.

Little easels were propped up on the tables along with brushes, bowls of water, and of course the watercolor paints.

Santos let the kids choose from a collection of landscape photos for their subjects and also let them select a paintbrush.

After they’d chosen their landscape photos, they were almost ready to begin painting.

“One more thing,” Santos told them. “Look for three values – light, medium and dark, or as we say in Rhode Island, 'wicked' dark.' ”

She explained how to create an optical illusion in a painting, how to make something look like it’s far away.

“We create distance by putting light colors in the background, dark colors in the front,” Santos said.

They started with a light sketch on the canvas and soon were all working intently, doing something called a watercolor wash (a flat layer of diluted color laid across the paper).

“You have artistic license to change your painting,” Santos said. “You have artistic license to not make it exactly like the picture.”

Pam Santos is from Wakefield and has her own Web site.