Watercolor for Beginners
Dates: Thursdays, October 8, 15 & 22, from 5pm to 8 pm
Fee: $195/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 3
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting & Drawing Studio
Discover the joy of watercolor in this relaxed four-week evening series designed especially for beginners. Each week, you’ll build on the skills from the previous class while exploring how water, pigment, color, and brushwork come together to create fresh and expressive paintings. Through a variety of fun, approachable projects, you’ll practice painting subjects such as skies, water, trees, rocks, snow-capped mountains, and still life.
You’ll learn the foundations of watercolor, including essential washes, brushwork, layering, and techniques for controlling water and pigment. We’ll explore color theory and practice mixing beautiful, varied colors while learning about the unique properties and characteristics of different pigments. You’ll also be introduced to the basics of an alla prima approach, along with simple layering techniques, and learn when each method can be useful.
By the end of the series, you’ll have a stronger understanding of watercolor techniques, greater confidence in your painting, and the skills to continue exploring watercolor on your own.
Watercolor Composition with Notan
Dates: Saturday, October 10, from 9 am to 3 pm
Fee: $155/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 1
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting & Drawing Studio
Learn how to use Notan to create stronger, more confident watercolor compositions. By simplifying a scene into essential patterns of light and dark, you’ll learn to see what makes a composition work before you even pick up your watercolor brush. This simple yet powerful tool can help you make thoughtful decisions about what to include, what to leave out, and where to place the most important shapes in your painting.
Through quick and approachable Notan studies, you’ll explore how reducing a scene to light and dark can reveal the shapes, patterns, and focal points that matter most. You’ll experiment with simplifying, moving, and rearranging shapes to create more dynamic compositions, then put your Notan study to work as a roadmap for a watercolor painting. Along the way, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to explore color, brushwork, and detail while building greater confidence in your composition.
All supplies will be provided.
Perspective Drawing for Urban Sketching
Date: Sunday, October 11 from 9am to 1 pm
Fee: $95/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 1
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting and Drawing Studio
Discover how understanding perspective can elevate your urban drawings and paintings. In this class, you’ll learn the fundamentals of one- and two-point linear perspective and how to use a few simple principles to create greater structure, depth, and confidence in your work. By combining linear perspective with aerial perspective, you’ll learn to create a convincing sense of distance and atmosphere while capturing the character and unique details of a place.
Through guided exercises and hands-on practice, you’ll learn to see the underlying structure of streets, buildings, and other elements within an urban scene and translate them accurately into your drawings and paintings. Weather permitting, we’ll also take our practice outdoors, giving you the opportunity to put your new perspective skills to work on location and have fun drawing the world around you.
All supplies are included.
The Fun of Mixing Color in Watercolor
Dates: Saturday, October 17, from 9 am to 3 pm
Fee: $155/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 1
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting & Drawing Studio
Discover the joy of mixing color directly on the paper and see what happens when water and pigment are allowed to do some of the work for you! In this fun, hands-on watercolor workshop, you’ll explore color theory, the unique properties of different pigments, and the beautiful effects created through wet-into-wet color mixing. You’ll learn how to create more interesting, luminous color combinations while embracing the fresh, spontaneous quality that makes watercolor so special.
We’ll explore how colors interact and influence one another, experiment with pigments ranging from transparent to opaque and granulating, and discover how their unique characteristics affect the way they mix. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll practice creating varied, vibrant color directly on the paper rather than mixing everything on the palette, learning when to control the paint and when to let the water and pigment create their own beautiful surprises.
All supplies will be provided.
Perspective Drawing For Interiors
Date: Sunday, October 18 from 9am to 1 pm
Fee: $95/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 1
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting and Drawing Studio
Learn the fundamentals of one- and two-point perspective and discover how these essential skills can elevate your urban drawings and paintings. Perspective becomes much more approachable once you understand a few simple principles, and learning to see and use it effectively will give your work greater structure, depth, and confidence.
In this class, you’ll learn how to use linear perspective to accurately draw buildings and three-dimensional forms, while exploring aerial perspective to create a convincing sense of depth, distance, and atmosphere. You’ll practice identifying the underlying structure of streets, buildings, and other elements within an urban scene, then apply these techniques to your own drawings.
Weather permitting, we’ll also take our practice outdoors, giving you the opportunity to put your new perspective skills to work on location while capturing the character and atmosphere of the places around you.
All supplies are included.
Perspective Drawing for Urban Sketching
Dates: Monday - Wednesday, August 10 - 12, from 5 pm to 7:30 pm
Fee: $155/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 3
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: Schack Art Center, Painting and Drawing Studio
Linear perspective is the key to drawing with greater accuracy, depth, and a convincing sense of three-dimensional space. This class is ideal for anyone interested in urban sketching or for those who want to build confidence drawing buildings, vehicles, figures, and everyday street scenes.
We’ll begin by learning the fundamentals of linear perspective through clear, practical exercises. Once the basics are established, we’ll take those skills outside—weather permitting—to sketch from life in the surrounding urban environment. Working on location, students will observe and draw directly from the architecture, streets, and activity around them, gaining confidence applying perspective in real-world settings.
All levels are welcome. The course focuses on practical techniques that will help you better understand structure, space, and proportion in your drawings.
All supplies are included.
Watercolor at the Waterfront
Dates: Monday - Wednesday, August 10 - 12, from 11 am to 4 pm
Fee: $275/ discount with member code
Ages: 16+
Levels: All Levels
Sessions: 3
Instructor: JoElle Gragilla
Location: The Jetty Bar & Grille, 1028 13th Street, Everett, WA 98201
This watercolor workshop introduces the fundamentals of painting and how to take those skills outdoors to work en plein air—painting directly from life. Slowing down, observing closely, and responding to the landscape are at the heart of this class, as nature becomes both the subject and the teacher.
We’ll meet each day at The Jetty Bar & Grille, located on the scenic Everett waterfront. After a brief demonstration and discussion of techniques—such as washes, wet-into-wet and wet-into-dry painting, and color mixing—we’ll disperse to nearby waterfront locations to paint the marina, islands, mountains, and working harbor.
All levels are welcome, from complete beginners to those with some experience. The class focuses on essential techniques you’ll return to again and again while building confidence painting outdoors.
All materials are provided for use during the workshop.
Please bring lunch or snacks, a water bottle, and whatever you need to be comfortable working outside—such as a hat, sunscreen, sunglasses, and/or a portable seat. We will plan to paint near the grassy areas around the waterfront; shaded spots are often available, though as this is a public space, they cannot be guaranteed.