February 16, 2019

We had another small group today, but (mostly) for the best of reasons. We send best wishes to our vacationing artists, congratulations to our new grandmother—and we also send good wishes to our recuperating artists. Meanwhile, we're either celebrating winter or denying it. Isa paints an idyllic winter scene, looking out her window at a snow-covered branch. There's so much to commend in this painting—the sun-drenched palette, the skillful use of complementary colors, the composition. This is truly the best of winter.

From there, Isa goes for a more spring-like feeling with this impressionistic painting of roses. Come back and see how it comes out.... but we're already impressed with the use of analogous colors in the blossoms.

 

Elaine O. continues to paint snow in this copy of a Monet painting. Like Isa, she's using complementary colors to focus the viewer's attention on the sun sparkling on the snow.

More complementary colors! Dana uses blue and brown (a dark orange) as she races to the finish on her horse and rider. Look carefully at the attention to detail on every bit of this painting—the hair, the fabric, the metal and leather—and then notice how the horse is looking closely at you! 

 
Sara is working away at her new series of portraits. Already an accomplished sketcher, she is trying to get the same confidence and energy in her watercolors. So she's selecting a person; and then, she has been exploring the model's face in a pencil sketch, Then (on the right below), she does a pencil sketch, but only an outline for the paint. And finally (in the larger painting on the left), she does a direct watercolor... no drawing first, she just boldly goes in with her paint and brush.

 

Here's a friend of Sara's. The painting on the left is still unfinished, but we are impressed with how valuable this exercise is turning out to be. The faces have the energy of the sketches but use  watercolor well. Sara's already so much bolder and more confident  and she's capturing the essence of the sitter with the minimum of strokes. 

 

Ken's almost finished with the latest in his newest series. Here's a great example of using watercolor in an unexpected way. Most people think of delicate, watery washes when they think of watercolor, not these dark nocturnes. We love the texture and deep, rich colors. And Chicago looks great, doesn't it?

Emilia has achieved the same festive night feeling in this exercise where she "paints outside" a magazine picture. Her goal was to practice color matching, but she's gone far beyond that!

Today, Emilia's exercise was the three-way fruit. She brought a fruit, but it was so good looking that she ate her model before starting to paint. So she used this apple to paint it three different ways—very wet, very dry and a combination...

...but she wasn't sure she'd achieved the extremes, so she began this really wet-in-wet painting of the apple. Look at the movement on these, especially the shading on the bottom apple. This is lovely!

Richard has finished his advanced color wheel below. Not a bit of wasted space here—notice how he's tested colors in the margins?

And here's Richard's exploration of complementary colors. His favorite is the orange/turquoise pair (just like the colors Isa used in her winter scene!) because of all the range of colors he can mix from just those two.

These newbies are such over-achievers! Richard has been playing with colors and brushstrokes on this abstract. There's such a lot going on here, isn't there?

We hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day and look forward to seeing you again next week.