Saturday, June 18, 2016

June 18, 2016

We're cool and comfortable today... in a new room. Yes, they moved us to the main building for the summer. So we spent some time exploring our new surroundings (we were especially impressed by the bathrooms!), but soon started painting. We hit the ground running, as you can see. Okay, sorry about that! Actually, this is Greeta's grandson running track. We love the composition and sense of movement here. It looks like it was painted from an expensive glossy magazine—yet she used a quick phone-camera snapshot as a reference.


Greeta's also proud of her garden, as evidenced by this beautiful painting. We love the statue and the glass birdbath, not to mention the wisteria. That's certainly an enjoyable place to spend a summer day!


More plants—but this time it's a dense, towering field of corn. In this painting from his "Corn" series, Ken has added patterning to the corn, bringing out individual stalks and making the rest of the field seem deep and impenetrable, like something out of a fairy tale.


Ken is looking at corn in a different way...horizontally. Notice the depth of the cornfield stretched out beyond the hill. And it's framed beautifully by the foreground corn tassels and leaves. 


Elaine's almost finished her memorial for an old sign... now gone. Our color correction isn't quite right here, but she's chosen to paint the scene in a eerie vintage cast that makes it seem even more retro. And the birds perched along the top gives a sense of scale, while making it even more eerie.


Madeleine's gone indoors to paint her ceramic shrine, perched atop a radiator. We love the warm colors that frame the mementos and contrast with the cool radiator. We also applaud her choice to angle the scene and add the slight vignetting at the top, making it seem active and dreamlike at the same time.


Anyone familiar with the Andersonville area has probably seen this bird. Probably at Pauline's, where Madeleine photographed him. She obviously had a good time painting the umbrella; it shows! And all those delicate feathers are done with a brush—not a pen!


You'd think Rosemary would be painting a bird, too—but no! She's trying her hand at a still life. Notice the lively complementary colors in the frame on the wall and the beautifully modeled orange in the bowl. Welcome back!


Welcome back to Steve, too. And we congratulate him on solving a particularly frustrating problem. When last we left our hero, you may recall he'd painted in a beautifully textured background...wonderful rocks, sky, water and clouds. And then he began to paint the merman.... only to discover a flaw in the sizing of the paper. His smooth washes revealed a giant blotch on the subject's left shoulder. Today, Steve experimented with colors and shading and he's disguised the flaw. Yay!


Bill went back into his painting to boost the saturation... and we love it! The flower really stands out and the gorgeous color palette reminds us of Roseville pottery.


From there, Bill moved on to a new interest of ours....architecture. This is the beginning of a painting of an ornate Byzantine building. The minimal palette and sketchy brushwork remind us of travel sketchbooks by Singer. Beautiful!


Mary is sketching buildings, too, but she's beginning with pencil. For all she claims to have trouble with the angularity of architecture, we can't find any problems with this nostalgic drawing of her childhood home.


Despite losing our cosmetology mirrors, Sara continues to work on her self-portrait, using a cell phone instead. We all agree that each sketch keeps getting better and better—and this is her best yet! 


Join us next week for more watercolor fun. And keep watching this space for news about an upcoming show two of our members will be mounting. You'll be invited!

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