Art Class 3/27/14

Spring classes started up again this week.  I have two weeks to attend before my new job starts on 4/7. 

Below is my very first oil painting.  White egg on a white sheet of drawing paper, put a spot light on it.  I got the oil paints a couple of years ago (right after we moved to Pennsylvania) and I finally decided to try them out.  Acrylics dry way too fast outdoors for plein air painting, so I figured I would give the oils a shot.  I really like the oil paint.  There are all kinds of things to mix into oil paint to make it do this or that.  This is just out of the tube.  It was such a joy to blend the paint to get the nice soft edges without the paint drying.

Art Class in Savannah

Working on a still life drawing.  It's really starting to look like something now.

Nancy Barch Workshop Aug 19-21, 2013

So, before leaving Delaware, I squeaked in one more 3-day workshop with Nancy Barch.  I find it interesting to note that from workshop to workshop, my approach and thought processes have changed from the first workshop I took with Nancy.  I am trying to become more process oriented and less concerned about outcomes.

My favorites from the workshop were built on top of older unfinished paintings.

Pat Dews Workshop June 10-14

For the longest time, I have been a huge fan of Pat Dews.  Way back when I first started painting, I got of one of her books, and she quickly became one of my first art "heroes".  Pat works in mixed media.  Watercolor, ink, acrylics and collage.  The supply list for this class was 2 pages long.  We worked full sheet for all paintings (22"x30"), so even the paper took up a lot of space.  Here is a photo of all the art supplies I took with me for the trip.

The following are photos of work in progress and painting "starts".  We started a lot of paintings.  I didn't finish most of them.  This first one was created with acrylic inks.

This next painting below is what Pat calls an "altered surface".  It was started from a failed painting I had kicking around from about 7 years ago.  Previously, I would have chopped the painting up and made cards out of it.  Pat showed us new ways to salvage lousy paintings and turn them into something new and interesting.  The original painting shows through most readily in the grey patches.  The original was bright orange and turquoise.  I washed over it with some grey to tone it down a little before laying out a new design on top of it.  It is interesting that a painting is more visually interesting and complex when it has some kind of under-painting, even if very little of it is obvious at the end.  This is the magic of the "altered surface" (building a painting on top of an old one) rather than using a new sheet of paper. This one is well on its way, but still needs some work.

 Painting below created with acrylic ink.  There are things about it I really like, but it's not finished.  Part of me likes the off balanced look of it, but hmmm...it really needs to have colors worked through from left to right and that big open space on the lower left really shouldn't stay that way.

This painting start was done with acrylics, and white spaces preserved by laying down collage pieces, which were painted over, and then removed.

Below is the finished painting from the painting start above.  Inspired by one of the photos Pat brought with her, taken at a shipyard.

Here we all are at the end of a very busy week.  Some amazing talent in this room!  Most of the students were fairly local.  Two ladies traveled all the way from Canada for this class.  Pat is right there, front and center in the bright pink (paint covered) shirt.  She is a fantastic teacher, and I highly recommend her workshops!

Watercolor with Experimental Mixed Media

For the spring term, I took a class at the Chester County Art Association in Watercolor with Experimental Mixed Media with Chris Chadwick.  It was my intention to just go to the class, try out whatever he had in mind for us to do with no expectations of producing any artwork worth keeping.  We used cheap watercolor paper, and a huge variety of other things to just experiment.  For the most part, the paintings I did in class were nothing to write home about.  However, a few paintings I like came out of it. 

This first painting is watercolor with rice paper collage.

The paintings below were all done the last 2 weeks of class.  In the second to the last class, he showed us how to do batik with paper, and we all enjoyed it so much that we unanimously voted to do batik in the last class also (he let us choose what we would do in the last class).  I like the batik so much that I would eventually like to get the supplies to be able to do it at home.  These are all watercolor with the batik.   

New Work

These paintings all utilize India ink.  The washes are done with acrylic ink, although it looks a lot like watercolor.

Nancy Barch Workshop: April 2013

Another fantastic workshop with Nancy Barch!  It was a 5-day workshop with a 3-day option (attend any 3 days).  Due to the schedule at work, 3 days was all I could get off from work.  These pictures were all "posed" with mat corners to show potential ways of cropping them.  The last one really is not quite finished yet.  I ran out of time and energy.  Overall, I'm really pleased with what I was able to accomplish in the 3 days.

Nancy Barch Workshop

I took a workshop with artist Nancy Barch last month.  I still have a hard time reconciling my interests in so many different directions of art simultaneously.  I suppose by my recent photos, it may have appeared that I wasn't enjoying this type of art anymore...well, I do.   I enjoy the other as well.

These pieces are just laid out with these mats for the purpose of the photo.  I have not made final crops on them, and eventually, I may crop them differently or have custom mats cut for them.

This green painting combines acrylic paint, image transfer (of some doodles from my sketchbook), collage, stamping and drawing.  It is a half sheet of watercolor paper, so is quite a bit bigger than this mat.  I don't know if I will mat it down to this small of a size (it's a 16x20" mat) or have a mat custom cut for it.  I like this composition, though.

 

This blue painting involves acrylic paint and collage. Like the green painting above, it was originally done on a half sheet, so I don't quite know how I want to crop it as a finished piece, but this pleases me pretty well as it is now.

This piece is Asian-inspired.  There is lots of 3-dimensional texture that may not be apparent in the photo.  It is on a quarter sheet of paper, and matted to 16x20".   It combines acrylic paint, acrylic gel medium texture, and collage.

The following two images come from a single painting on a quarter sheet.  There is a lot of collage in there and the color is provided by acrylic inks.  There are numerous ways that this piece could be cut up, and I haven't decided how to crop it yet.  Both of these are possibilities.

Needless to say, it was an extremely fun workshop, and I hope to be able to take more classes and workshops with Nancy in the future!

New Drawing

It has been a while since I posted any of the drawings from my art class.  This is the drawing I started on Week 4.  I continued working on it in Week 5.  At that point, it still needed some work, but I needed to take a break from this.  Over the next few weeks, I started several drawings, but finished none of them.  Last night was our last class, so I took all my half-finished drawings with me and decided to try and get one or more of them wrapped up.  Finally, I am declaring this one finished.  Image size is approx. 14" by 17", charcoal on Raffine heavy sketch paper.

Drawing and Painting: Composition

Our topic this week was COMPOSITION.  We learned about structural composition and placement.  I worked from a reference photo and chose to do an unconventional cropping of the image to create a more dynamic composition.  The teacher gave it the "thumbs up", so I came home feeling much more pleased than I did a couple of weeks ago.  (We did not have class last week, so that is where the lost week went.)

I am working on a smoother paper than I worked on with the Still Life class last spring.  The dimples in paper made for working with charcoal kinda bug me...in particular, the texture of Strathmore charcoal paper.  I don't like it much.  This is a heavy weight sketch paper by Raffine, it's got a nice tooth to it.  I am really loving the charcoal and plan to continue with it.  I guess one thing I love about it is all the nice variation in tone that can be achieved by working the surface (I tend to use my fingers).  I enjoy getting my fingers in there and blend and smooth the color out.