Take Control of Your Paintings: Class Recap

Here is a short slideshow of last weeks demo.  One of my students brought a painting in and asked me to worked on it. We decided to take it a different direction. Taking out the sky and adding trees in the background. We talked about making area recede and changing the way the light moved through the painting. Need a few finally touches. I can talk about that this week. Take a look if you have a chance. Let me know if you have questions,

Dawn

Plein air Thursday - 2013

This year my friend and fellow painter, Carol Violanda, and I started a new plein air group in Atlanta that meets up every Thursday. Our motto " We create the group, they will come!"

And so far it has worked out really well. I have made new arts friends and discovered all sorts of new places in Atlanta that I didn't even know existed. Here are few of the highlights of our adventures.
Hope to paint with you in 2014!

Using your Values to building a composition

I just finished teaching a workshop on painting landscapes and I thought I would share a few tips.

Original photo. This is a scene in France that I am working on.

I often like to make a black and white copy so that I can just focus on the values and not be distracted by the color.

I forgot to photograph Step 1 which was a  monochromatic value study. This is Step 2	.

Step 2: now that you have blocked in the large areas of light and dark, check to make sure you like the design of your composition. This is the time to make adjustments. You can know start to build on the information you have down.

Step 3

 Step 3: Working within in the pattern of your light and dark values, start to build the color.

Step 4

 Step 4: continue to build the color, still mindful of your values. You can now begin to add details

Step 5

Step 5: Adding more detail and adjust the colors. If you keep your colors in the correct value range, you will keep the compositional design.

Step 6

Now for the fun to start - laying in the details and rich color. At this point, you are free to paint. You have your foundation set, so have fun.

 I will post the finished painting ASAP

Cheers, Dawn

The Process of teaching : Palette Knife Workshop - Landscapes

This is a little bit about my approach to teaching a one day workshop.

 I had a wonderful group show up for a 5 hour workshop today at Spruill. I know that it's a lot of information in a short amount of time. We covered some of the various techniques of the palette knife, along with a little color theory, and composition. 

Okay, maybe I should call it palette knife boot camp. 

I just like the idea of learning new techniques while working on a painting. 

Somethings will work, some not, ahh, that's better than just writing your abc over and over, right?

The first thing I do is work through the painting Alla Prima, which just means I do the painting in one sitting. I work wet paint into wet paint instead of working in stages and allowing paint to dry.

Once I have completed the painting once, I will break it down into stages.  By bringing in several different canvases showing the building process, I hope this will give the class a visual aid as I am lecturing and demonstrating in class.

Now I am ready to teach class.  I start with a talk about composition, value scale, tricks for landscape painting, and just how to prepare the canvas.  Now the class is ready to create their masterpieces.   Well, I  always throw in a little color theory through the class, but just in small doses. Let the paintings begin!

I have my sample steps up. I hope that these will help show where I am going.  Also, it  is always helpful to see how just messy a palette knife painting can be while you are working on it.

This is one of the paintings I worked on in the workshop today.

I had a wonderful class today. Thank you for all the artists that came out and spent their Saturday with me. Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Dawn