Sketching at Gere-a-Deli's

Some of my students just started a sketch group recently, and I was able to join them on Monday because I didni't have to teach.  It was great fun and, now that I have been snowed in for a couple of days, I appreciate the opportunity even more.  We met at a local luncheon place, and because it was President's Day, there was more activy than usual, and lots of subjects to sketch.  We had to work quickly, which in its way was good skill building, but the results were varied.  In any case, fun was had by all.  A few sketches below ...

Composite of three folks at separate tables

Family of seven ~ Mom, dad, five kids and a sixth on the way

Love the beret.  This guy was fun to sketch.  As I was finishing up, I noticed his anarack was not the same as it had been, and I saw it move in a funny way.  All of a sudden, a little dog's head popped out of his chest to finish reading the newspaper.  The beret and the pup got up to leave before I could "catch" him.  Amazing!  You never know what will be next when you sketch in public places! 



Snowed in and catching up

Well, it's not that there's so much snow, although there is a lot, it's the ice that makes getting off my hill pretty treacherous.  So, I am trying to pay attention to chores having gone undone for a while, and updating my blog.

I haven't written since I went to Myrna Wacknov's Variations Five Day Workshop in Portland [http://www.myrnawacknov.blogspot.com/ ], where, with one image she sent before the workshop, we worked with major elements of design, including shape, size, direction, value, line, color and texture, and relationsips of unity, repetition, donimance, balance, harmony, gradation, etc. [Long sentence, I know, but it tells you a little bit about why the workshop had to be five days!]

Myrna sent us an image of a San Francisco artist named Mike Johnson, who is a very interesting character.  Each day, after Myrna demoed and shared inspiring and creative ideas, we would paint one or two paintings using dominant elements and limited palettes.  Challenging but really liberating in some ways.

We had to roll the dice and a draw slips of paper to determine dominant design elements we were to use, and colors we could use.  My first "roll" and "draw" were Shape dominant with  Direction secondary, and a palette of blue/green and yellow/orange.  What does one do??

Here's one I did just to loosen up and try a "variation" with my Dr Ph Martin Hydrus watercolors.

These watercolors are extremely concentrated and dry permanently.  In all other ways, they act like traditional watercolors.  The fun thing to do with these is to "draw" with the droppers themselves.  The painting of "Big Mike" was done almost exclusively with the droppers, and watercolor crayon.  LOVED the process and am painting/drawing with them more than with traditional watercolors at the moment.



Will be doing a second post today if I can't get outside  ...



Away too long ...

As much as I enjoy seeing other artists' blogs updated almost on a daily basis, I am afraid I have been so not able to devote time and attention to my blog.  It's not that I haven't been painting, I have been painting for classes and student demonstrations.  As many of you know, I have been creating calendars from watercolor paintings I have done during each of the past four years.  It might be that I will share those, but not today.

As much as I have loved painting with watercolors, I am so loving painting with acrylics.  I teach both watercolors and acrylics, but I am finding that when I paint just for the fun of it, I am painting more with acrylics than watercolors.  Acrylics continue to make me smile, and I get less stressed out when I am messing about in acrylics.  A couple of recent acrylics [since my last blog entry!] are below.

This photo of my birches painting was taken by my friend, Linda, at the art show where it was sold.  I was in such a rush to get the painting in to the show, that I forogt to take a photo in good light at home.  I used this painting as a demo for acrylics classes using palette knives.  The students loved the lesson and did great work to boot!

This was another acrylic I did to use as my Christmas card.   My son looked at it, and said that it didn't look anything LIKE my granddaughter.  Well, that is really fine, because it was not meant to.  Odd, that he made a negative statement that I interpret as a positive.  It IS sort of a stylized impression of a young girl that might look like my granddaughter with some tweaking.  Anyway, I was happy with the outcome.

Th tulip picker is from a photo I took several years ago during the Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley about five minutes from where I live.  When I took the photo, the young man was as shocked as I was to see him.  He smiled, I smiled and I clicked the picture.  I tried to paint it several times as a watercolor, but it always lacked something and never seemed to come together.  During my "playing with knives" period this past fall and winter, I did this totally with palette knives.  I thoroughly enjoyed the process as I always do when playing with knives ...  I am now understanding that it is truly about hte process as much as it is about the outcome. 

Art League North, one of the painting groups I belonged to, liked the outcome as well.  They selected it to be used for the 2011 Tulip Festival Art Bash Show poster.  Am pleased with that, and humbled because there were so many other great paintings in the running.

Well, now that I have caught up somewhat, I am promising myself that I will be more attentive to updating my blog.  It's a discipline as much as anything else, and it makes me accounatable to you and to myself for painting more and sharing more.  

Would love for those of you who are dropping by the blog anonymously, to comment, good or not so good, comments and questions.  You can sign up to receive notificaton of the random and hopefully more often, posts I make.  Would love to hear from you!

Playing with knives

I haven't played with knives for years.  The only classroom experience with them was more than thirty-five years ago in an adult ed oil class.  I remember loving the resulting textures and effects, even though I wasn't sure if I were doing it "right."  I am still not sure if I am doing it right, but I have been fooling around, and, again/still I am intrigued by the texture.  Here are two quick practice attempts.  I like them well enough, but I still have a lot to learn, but isn't that always the case?

Mixing it up

Folks ask me which medium I enjoy the most, and I have to say, the one I am working in at the moment.  To be sure, I find painting with acrylics exciting and forgiving, and I have said it before, acrylics make me smile.

But I so enjoy doing watercolors when I am doing them.  I love the way colors mingle and surprise me, and the way happy accidents [hackneyed phrase but true] can also make me smile.  I have to admit, as much fun as I have painting with watercolors, I do find myself stressing more with them than acrylics. 

In any case, because I will be doing classes in both this "semester" at the Senior Centers, I felt I'd better get back in the groove.  So I did the figure below from a photo I took at a fair a while ago, and I am relatively pleased with the results.  Not perfect, but not terrible, I think. 

Am trying so hard to keep paintings fresh and not too overworked, so I limited the time I would spend on this to get a finished piece.  When I do that, I can live up to the credo I try to impart of painting "fast and loose," not laboring for weeks at a time on one painting in class.  I get bored too easily, and I am sure that would show in my class, if we worked that way.

So, different strokes ... and an attempt to stay fast and loose.

Taking my own advice

Well, I'm really taking the advice of all who know, and tell us to check values and to not be a slave to the source.  When I first painted a little series of poppies from my garden with acrylics, I was relatively pleased, because they were MY poppies, in MY garden.  But, I wasn't really thrilled with the paintings.

 

First one

So, lately, I have been observing and advising students and painting friends at critiques [when asked!], that values are so important, and the colors used are not necessarily as important, when I finally "listened" to myself, and took another look at my little poppy paintings.  Yuck!  No value change at all.  I took a dab of dioxizine purple and deepened the values around my poppy, which, I think helped a lot.  What do you think?
 

Today's effort

Thanks to Nick for my Geishas

I so enjoyed workshop with Nicholas Simmons at Kanuga Watercolors Workshop in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in April, that I wanted to do more.  I've been teaching both watercolors and acrylics at the local Senior Centers, and shared my experience of Nick's workshop with my students.  Nick showed us that these geishas [and his process] could be done in both watercolors and acrylics. Pouring,throwing, masking and layers were involved ...  Sometimes, I forget which medium was used on which painting.  At the workshop, Nick did his demo geisha with fluid acrylics, all while keeping a watercolor-like transparency in his painting.  The point was well taken that indeed acrylics can be transparent.

I did the first geisha here in watercolors only, for my watercolor class, and the second one is done in acrylics, both using Nick's pouring, throwing, masking processes.  I was pleased and surprised at the results of both.  The classes enjoyed doing them, too. 

The third in the series is an attempt to integrate yet another experiement of doing a quick acylic "sketch" of three geisha heads on a piece of scrap while I was preparing for class, and believing it turned out to be kind of fun, I fiddled some more, creating an acrylic background on a gessoed "bad" watercolor painting from my closet.  I attached the sketch to the background, applied a bit of modeling paste around its edges, then stamped and etched in a few spirals in the paste.   When it was dry [it seemed to take forever], I applied some gold fluid acrylic to the "ridges," then went over that with a bit of quinachidone gold and quinachridone burnt orange.

All of it was fun, and I felt as if I were evolving, blending lessons from Nick's workshop, with some ideas of my own.  Isn't that the way? That we learn from extremely talented artists in workshops, classes, books, etc., who share insights, techniques, style, and then integrate what we learn from them into our own creativity and style, then go on to teach and share with others.  Paying it forward, yes?