This is María with her painting. I nearly cried when I saw her first watercolour all finished and in the frame. It is so beautiful, so strong and so confident. She has been coming to watercolour classes for just 3 sessions.

– María has several pieces on the go at the same time because I tell her she needs to have a break from one piece and come back to it 10 minutes later with fresh eyes. The paintings also need some time to dry between layers. We work wet at first, creating colourful bleeds. Then we layer up the colours, one over another with abstract mark making. To keep the colours clean and bright, each coloured ink has it’s own set of brushes to work with, keeping them free from cross contamination at all times from other colours. Sometimes when María is painting I stop her to turn around the paper because an abstract needs to be balanced from all sides. I am teaching her my specialised style with the technique I have developed over time and she is doing her own version. It’s so interesting to see what she does with it. You can see my watercolours in my web gallery.

She has an A3 red love heart on the go and some bookmarks and an A4 piece too. She is an academic, who has not had much of a chance to create art and it is opening up her creative mind, learning the language of watercolours.