Sara's finished her autumn painting...just in time, too. None of the colorful leaves remain in this view through her kitchen window. We love so many things about this—the colors, the contrast between the structured lines of the window and deck rail and the softly abstracted foliage, the diagonal line of the sky which adds energy to the composition—pretty much everything, in fact.
Steve takes us back to summer as he adds foliage behind the flowers. Notice how the aerial perspective of the leaves adds depth. It feels like the greenery goes back forever.
Susan's landscape is from a different hemisphere and a different season. This is a ranch in New Zealand. She memorializes this view from a restaurant where she enjoyed lunch, after a hike and a sheep shearing. What great colors and what an incredible view!
Tony finished his portrait of a friend in Greece. The colors and composition are perfectly and deliberately placed and remind us of Hockney's use of color and shape.
Moving on, Tony explores new content and color, as you can see. He's painting a bug on a rose and using darker, brighter colors. The complementary colors are perfect for Christmas, too!
Ellen's getting ready for Christmas... and continuing her experimentation, too. Here, she's done a lot of subjects and used a variety of papers. We begin with an overview of her work today as she compares paint on paper towels, watercolor paper and rice paper.
Here, she paints pine cones on all three surfaces. (We like the rice paper best as it seems to best show off the colors and provides just the right amount of absorbency.)
Here are some of the most fluid goldfish we've ever seen. They have a different feel on the different papers, but the bottom (paper towel) has nine fish and so it's lucky as well as beautiful.
Here are orchid grass and bamboo strokes...
... and here are mums. Zoom in to see the beautiful effect Ellen achieves with one stroke of a brush that's been loaded with more than one color of paint.
Elaine T. is trying to paint more transparently. This landscape features minimally elegant brush strokes and clear color. Transparent? Yes! Beautiful? Absolutely!
As if the landscape weren't enough, Elaine T. also painted this rocket ship. Again, she set a goal of transparency. And it's amazing how she was able to get such a dark background and still have it look transparent. Success!!
You may have recognized the space ship above and wondered how Elaine T's Flash Gordon portrait turned out. Don't worry! We wouldn't forget to show it. Zoom in and study this masterpiece in lighting. See how the radium reflects onto all the other surfaces and how every detail is lovingly attended to. This brings back some wonderful memories!
Elaine O has finished her portrait too. But instead of radium green, this has the pink glow of the Barbie aisle at the toystore. Pat, our teacher, joked that this looks like entering a red period...and if you look at our work today, it seems more than a few of us are leaning toward red (Steve, Tony and Elaine). Well, it's a great antidote for the grey skies.
Dana managed to do three small eye studies. All three of the eyes below are different colors, different orientations, and different emphasis. But all three have wonderful detail and highlights and sparkle. Look at this straight on view of a smiling eye....
... this brown eye seen slightly from the side...
... and this icy blue eye almost in profile. This is amazing work!
We'll be off next week, celebrating Thanksgiving. Know that you are some of the people we're most thankful for and we look forward to seeing you again on December 1. Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving!
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