Monday, March 24, 2008

BOZZETTO #1 - Neutrals


Today I went to the final class of Watercolor Beyond the Obvious. This is where each participant in the class shows their 20 paintings in sequential order. It is a fun celebration with lots of art affirming moments for each artist and cudos for Mike Bailey, the incredible innovator of this unique class and educator par excellance! It made me wish I had taken the class again, it's so much fun and motivating and reinforced the value of staying with an image to pull out the creativity. If you keep changing the image, you do the same thing but change the image. If you keep the image, you do something different each time. I have taken the class 3 times. Some students have taken it 6 or more times. If I wasn't so busy, I could take it indefinately. My 3 series are posted on my website.

Doing a sheet of bozzettos is another version of beyond the obvious, in miniature. I did this first one after dinner tonight. I had a plan and color scheme decided before I started. I have been going a little wild with color lately and I wanted to start with a neutral color scheme. I used mostly raw umber and ultramarine blue with a little cerulean blue and burnt sienna and a touch of cad red light and quin gold. The darkest darks were ultramarine mixed raw umber. I also worked with a 3/4 inch and half inch flat brush. I normally use a round brush, so I wanted to challenge myself to develop greater mastery over the flat brush.

I was surprised how resistant the surface was to paint in the beginning. I had to really decrease the amount of water to paint. The surface did lift beautifully, however.

Tomorrow is another Beyond the Obvious celebration. The class is so popular, they added a second section. I look forward to more inspiration and comaraderie. A wonderful potluck lunch is an added bonus.

2 comments:

Cecelia said...

That is just gorgeous, Myrna.
One of my art profs in college, would stop class when she would see someone with dark skin walking across campus. She said that people with dark skin, like the Egyptian students. were so lucky! They could wear just any colors. And she loved to paint them. She had flaming red hair and fair skin, and I thought that she was lucky to have that gorgeous red hair!
I used portraits to try to calm racial tensions in my classes. I told students that we can use exactly the same colors to paint anyone-just different amounts of color. Then we did portraits of each other that way, and it worked. Most liked doing portraits but many didn't want to pose!
The workshop sounds like so much fun!
I'm looking forward to the Worldwide Sketch Crawl on Saturday. Hope that you and others will take a few minutes, at least, to do it too. I can see people all over the world, drawing that day.

Nava said...

Very effective! And love the mood.

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