Shirley Trevena: My World of Watercolour Shirley Trevena

In this watercolor workshop Shirley Trevena takes you on a journey through her creative process from how to start a picture from scratch to how to decide when a painting is truly finished. This video is full of wisdom, inspiration and a sheer delight to watch.

Her style is immediately recognizable and mixes her skills as a colorist with vaulting imagination and style.

Note: The path of Trevena’s My World of Watercolour is a bit different than the standard walk through an entire project. The workshops are divided into three main sections.

In the first section, she uses the start of one painting to demonstrate how she begins, but does not complete the project. Rather, she mentions issues like paper selection, color palette, tilting perspective, edge and line quality. Although you never see Trevena finish the painting, there is a still image of the finished painting at the end of the chapter.

In the second section of this workshop, she focuses in on the issues faced in the middle of a project. With an entirely different painting, Trevena shows a few of the methods she uses to help make decisions when dealing with expanses of white and areas that don’t feel quite right.

Her final section delves into what makes a painting finished. She talks about color enhancing, blotting, tweaking, linking, texturing, and scrubbing, among other things. She completes a totally different painting than addressed in the previous two sections.

Throughout the video, Trevena’s tone is calm, and paced. At the end of each section, the colors she uses are listed adjacent to the painting.

Review by Lynn Powers

I’ve always enjoyed watching artists, who bring a sense of who they are, to their work.In this DVD Shirley Trevena does just that.

In this DVD workshop you see Trevena’s creative thought process as she works through each stage of her paintings and solves different problems.

This workshop may be more relevant to the intermediate or advanced, not the beginning watercolorist. While in earlier workshops she explains materials and techniques, in “My World of Watercolor” she moves beyond technique into the realm of personal approach to design.

Trevena has a loose style held together with very strong design. She mentions important design principals (linkage, good shapes, pulling the eye around the painting, using color and dominance, among others) as she constructs her painting and assumes the viewer understands them from their own experience. By remaining attentive the viewer will snare some real gems of wisdom.

Trevena starts her paintings from a single point and works out. She does not pre-draw. She applies her paint on dry paper and then adds water, block, and draws with a stick. Sometimes she applies watercolor pencil into wet surfaces by means of sandpaper. Her work is rich with texture and variety strengthened by her selection of colors.

Shirley Trevena has a strong personality and a strong sense of design that comes across as a bit quirky . She and her work are unique, strong, colorful and a one of a kind. I will watch this DVD again, many times. I give it a thumbs-up!