Persona Watercolors

wa·ter·col·or: artists’ paint made with a water-soluble binder such as gum arabic, and thinned with water rather than oil, giving a transparent color.

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Almost all of Susan Searway-Fertig’s Persona watercolor are started in life drawing/painting sessions. If not completed I take them back into my art studio, Studio #18 at Art Works Downtown, to add the final brush strokes to complete the composition. There is something amazingly beautiful to observe and paint the human form from life.

A lot of people ask why watercolor in a life drawing session rather than drawing in charcoal or pencil? One day my life drawing instructor at Dominican University of California handed me a brush and a set of watercolors during a life drawing session and said go. With no instruction I was encouraged to just paint. Figure out how the new medium works and improvise on the spot. The unpredictability of how the water will change the composition, the use, and layering of colors and bleeds turned into beautiful “mistakes” in my work. I was hooked and I fell in Iove the medium of watercolor that day many years ago.