Discover the most interesting elements from your source material as you mold shapes and relationships to fit your unique vision.

Donna Zagotta's inquisitive approach to design helps you create powerful compositions that say as much about you as they do about your subjects.

In this video workshop, Zagotta breaks her process into manageable steps and approaches design challenges one at a time.

With her design firmly established, she is free to focus on her extended painting process. She concentrates on setting up color relationships and establishing a light pattern. Zagotta mixes an extensive watercolor palette with white gouache. The opaque paints free her to make corrections and solve design problems at any moment and achieve a complex layered effect. Donna develops color, shape, and value relationships until the painting passes her ultimate test: you know its right when you love it!

Bonus Clip: "Creative Sketching with Shapes"

In these bonus clips from her video workshop, The You Factor: Powerful, Personal Design in Opaque Watercolor, Donna Zagotta teaches two methods for sketching artistic, personalized designs. First you learn how to create variations on a single shape with contour drawing. Then Donna transforms a street scene composition by emphasizing a round shape motif in all the key objects in the scene.

Donna Zagotta, Figurative, Gouache
Active professionally for more than 20 years, Donna Zagotta is a nationally recognized artist, teacher, and juror. Zagotta's paintings have evolved from an early emphasis on traditional watercolor techniques and traditionally influenced realism to an unconventional use of the watercolor medium and the exploration of the area that lies between realism and abstraction. Zagotta has a passion for art history with a special interest in Modernism and finds inspiration in the work of Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, and Richard Diebenkorn. This list includes the master painters who were more focused on expressing color and spatial ideas than in rendering the particulars of subject matter.

Watercolor Magazine Article: "Make a Statement" by Donna Zagotta (pdf)