PORTLAND WORKSHOP DEMOS!

Computers can be so darn exasperating!!!!  I have had the worst time trying to connect to the Internet using my host's wifi connection.  Somehow I figured something out tonight because I finally was able to get it to work.  

We just completed day 3 of the workshop.  All 21 participants are having too much fun!  They are embracing the concept and running with it.  I am hoping to be able to create a slide show to share with everyone.  That will be my next tehno challenge!  In the meantime, here are the first two demos I painted on Tuesday.  The first one is showing VALUE as the dominant element. Painted on Tyvek. Everyone, including me, draws a slip with a color combination to work with.  This one was green, violet and orange.  

The second painting has SHAPE as the dominant element with analogous colors of yellow green, green and blue green.  This one was painted on textured gesso.

The group talked me into dealing with texture tomorrow instead of Friday.  Half the group are already texture junkies.  I think I draw them to me.  The rest of the class will be texture converts by the end of the day.  

ALL IN A DAYS WORK...SAN DIEGO WATERCOLOR SOCIETY WORKSHOP

Today is the second day of the Variations Workshop.  I am working with an exciting group of artists.  Everyone is so helpful and friendly. It is a real joy to be here.  Yesterday we worked on creating shapes and changing shapes in the morning.  The afternoon was spent working on value patterns for the morning drawings.  Today we had something to start a painting with.  Everyone made at least two paintings today.  There was amazing creativity exhibited.  We had a little show and tell at the end of the day.  I took photos but I am too tired tonight to make the slide show, so stay tuned for tomorrow night.

Tuesday is the meeting night of the society and I was the program!!  The top painting is my demo for the evening.  It was drawn and painted in less than an hour.  It is a fairly straight forward portrait.  The bottom painting is my demo for the class this morning.  It is a very stylized version of the same gentleman.  I want to do another painting of this image with a few changes,  The second image is painted with acrylic inks.  This is the first time I tried these paints on this particular paper.  It dried very fast, which I liked but the lines feathered quite a bit.  Not sure  why this is happening.  I will have to explore a little more when there is more time.  

Between the end of class and the demo, we made a little trip to a Dick Blick store which was lots of fun. Across the street was a great Italian restaurant where we had an excellent dinner and time to visit a bit.

2ND BLEACH PAINTING EXPERIMENT

After completing the first bleach painting, I wondered what would happen if I used different dilutions of ink and bleach. That's what this painting is investigating. I let the computer do the hard work and broke the image down into 4 values, printed out the results and used that as my guide. I drew the shapes of the values in with a charcoal pencil and then painted away. This ink is decidedly blue when diluted. I let stage one dry, then went about bleaching out the ink areas. I diluted the bleach about 50/50 and it seemed to work. There was practically no odor, so this is a good discovery. I played around with a little stamping. I can't seem to help myself! I'm not sure if I took too much off or not. Tomorrow I will be sitting at Gallery Concord, so I will take my paints and put the color in. If you are in the area, stop by and say hi.

DAY 2 VARIATIONS WORKSHOP SLIDESHOW!

Here are the two demo paintings I painted today. One is on Tyvek and the other is traditional watercolor paper with some aluminum foil shapes, some acrylic medium resist and Dr. Martin's Hydrus liquid watercolor with GAC200 mixed in to adhere to the foil. You can make watercolor acrylic by adding acrylic medium to it.

Everyone was really into the assignments and did some fantastic work (as you can see in the slide show). Not everyone had their paintings at a finished stage, so I will be adding some more to the show tomorrow. Also, I am slow at learning names. I have left some names off for now and probably made a mistake or two assigning names to paintings. I was excited about the work and wanted to show it off tonight, but I will make additions and corrections to the slide show tomorrow. Be sure and check back! In the meantime, sit back and enjoy....

MINNESOTA "VARIATIONS" WORKSHOP DAY 1: SHAPE AND VALUE DRAWINGS

From San Diego, I flew to Minneapolis on Sunday. Today we started "Variations" workshop with 15 enthusiastic participants. Everyone is excited and working hard. I am seeing some great drawings and ideas emerging. Creating shape drawings in various modes fills the morning, then the afternoon is working on various value patterns for these drawings. Tomorrow starts the painting process. I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with. This is as much fun for me as it is for the workshop students. I will be doing a demo and then everyone will get to work. I will do my best to take some photographs to post tomorrow night.

Here are some variations and value patterns I created from one of my drawings to give you an idea of today's lesson. We are all working from the same image this week. Does she look familiar? I did a few paintings of this image the last few weeks as a warm up for the workshop.

VALUE STUDIES

I spend most mornings exercising in the pool, so I wake up and put on my suit before I have a chance to talk myself out of it. This morning I went into the studio to get some drawings transfered to watercolor paper in preparation for painting before I left for the pool. Well, I started painting and never left the house! About noon I decided to change out of my suit. It wasn't going to get wet today.

My project was to create illustrations for my book showing how one value study can be painted in a variety of ways depending on what value represented light, mid and dark. It's a lot easier to paint than it is to verbalize the concept in a few sentences. I am finding the wording a challenge. Most of these paintings are 9 x 12. I started out doing 4.5 x 6 paintings but found it difficult to paint "neatly" so small. I used the same three colors for all of the paintings. My photography and adjustments have slightly altered the color, but you get the idea. The colors are Quin Gold by Sennelier (it has a green tinge to it) Brown Madder and Indigo. The last image is a different value pattern than the rest. One of the samples got away from me and deviated from the value pattern. I will leave it up to the viewer to decide which one that is.

Painting really goes so much faster when decisions like value and color are decided in advance, not to mention the success rate goes up. I know which basic colors I am going to work with before I start, but I decide as I go along what will go where. It's great to only have to focus on technique and the color choices. There's still enough surprises to keep it interesting. If it were totally worked out in advance, it would take the fun out of painting for me.

THE VALUE OF THE VALUE SKETCH

These are 4 value studies I did yesterday in preparation for my next painting. I want to do more because I really like this image and plan to use it to explore color ideas. It gives me so much more confidence to start painting when I have the darks, lights and middle values already decided. I totally messed up the Zentangle painting because I didn't have a plan. That is when I really became a total believer in creating these multi-value sketches. Each time I do one, another variation comes to mind. I finally had to quit after four because it was getting late.

It took quite a few steps to get from original drawing to finished value sketch. The original image was created by overlaying two drawings to create a new one. The resulting pattern is half-sheet size. To reduce it down, I photographed it and then tried to adjust the lighting in the computer. This was nearly impossible because tracing paper on a sliding glass door doesn't photograph white. I then printed it out in a reduced size. There wasn't that much difference between the lines and the background. I went over the lines with a pen, then I traced the small image twice and put that in the copier. It's worth all the trouble because now I can print out as many as I want. I glue them into my sketch book to save them.

I have started the first painting using one of the value patterns. Hopefully, I will manage to finish it tomorrow.

FRENCHMAN DISTORTED SHAPE: VALUE PATTERNS

As part of the process of creating lots of variations, it is useful to have a variety of value patterns to choose from. I did these four very quickly yesterday. I ran out of time, but I plan to do more.

Tonight I had lots of fun at the FALC meeting doing a demo in about an hour and 10 minutes. I want to finish it before I publish. Nava was busy taking pictures of me, so I will probably have a little slide show to go along with the painting.

THE DONNA ZAGOTTA WORKSHOP!

Well, I guess the country was going to the dogs this week, but I was having a great time in Donna Zagotta's workshop sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society (SCVWS) Above are the 3 paintings I completed this week. The focus was on designing the rectangle with simplified shapes and creating value patterns. Each one of these is a different value pattern. This is her fourth workshop for SCVWS as everyone gets so much out of it and wants more, more, more! She designed this workshop to be more advanced and included an evaluation sheet for how to determine your direction and how to create a focused approach to moving to the next level, plus individual consultations. It was intense.

We also had a lot of fun and Thursday night went to Stanford University to see a Diebenkorn exhibit. They also had a traveling exhibit "Saved from the Storm" from the New Orleans museum collection. I have created a small slide show of some of the week's activities. Notice the Duane Hansen sculpture of a workman leaning against the wall. It is rather unnerving, to say the least, but we had a lot of fun checking him out. There was another Duane Hansen sculpture in Kansas City dressed as a Museum Guard. What I am noticing about both of these scupltures is how dusty they are getting. It must be difficult to keep them pristine.

Tomorrow I will post the slide show for FRENCHMAN: LINE AS TEXTURE.
Here is the slide show from my photos. I didn't take that many. If you attended the workshop and have additional photos you would like to add to the slide show, you can do so from your computer! I will get a message letting me know and to give my approval.

THE DEFINITIVE WORD ON COLOR VS. VALUE!

Mike Bailey (http://www.mebaileyart.com) has sent me his considered explanation of the difference between a "color painter" and a "value painter" It is beautifully explained by one of the best teachers around. I have his permission to share his thoughts with you. Mike has a current discussion on his blog regarding design which you should definitely check out as well!


"Topher brought this up under the following context: That the only way painters can delineate *volume* or *form* is by manipulating values. That is to use values as light and shadow would behave. Alex Powers is a Value painter. He establishes form using little color and a lot of value changes. He augments his work with some textural qualities, but the image is value based. Value painters (the most common among us) us extremes of value (dark vs light) to hold the eye in an interest center or focal point.

On the other hand, colorists, are not always interested in the idea of form or volume. Instead they are more interested in showing off color differences, (hue, temperature or intensity), WITHOUT showing value shifts . . . . .that is holding the values constant . . .no indication of light and shadow . . .just flat space with color, not value, shifts.

What Powers and Schink are saying is that in a "value painting" the value differences distract the eye from the more subtle color shifts, such as a slight temperature change in red, for example. If a significantly darker space was near that temperature shift, it would not appear as obvious because of the distraction of the value contrast.

This goes to the "order of seeing." Where we see value differences first, pattern or texture second and THEN color differences. Physiologically, our eyes are made that way. We don't have a choice in the matter.

So, color painters, or colorists, rely on subtle or no value changes in order to show of color variance in temperature or intensity or hue. Luminosity, where the appearance of light coming FROM an object or surface (versus illumination . . .where light is shining ON a surface) is painted by keeping values very close, no darks, no whites . . . .using pure color tints in the luminating area and surrounding that area with near neutrals. This is an intensity change, not a value change.

Skip Lawrence a few years back was on a chase to paint "color as value" where he would use the natural value of colors as they came from the tube to show value changes and ignored the actual hue. for example, in a light and shadow situation, he might use a peach tint for light and a deep purple in shadow. The value difference was the key in his paintings. Where there were subtle color shifts in his paintings such as a change from cool red to warm red, it could not hold the eye . . .and was often missed by the viewer because of the value difference between the peach and purple.

Can painters do what Myrna did in her portrait? Absolutely. She used color as value in her peice and shows off big differences in warm hue versus cool hue . . .but the value structure is still intact. So, Alex Powers would (probably) say that hers was a value painting with colored textural elements exciting the surface.

The key in what Topher was talking about was to decide between flat versus form."

Finally, a clear definition of "Value vs. Color" that finally gets it through my brain! Thank you, Mike. I have taken Mike's class "Watercolor Beyond the Obvious" 3 times (see "series" on my website) and I remember this discussion, but I don't think I truly understood it until now. I think color may be the most complex subject in art. So great to realize that learning never stops and there is so much more to explore! I guess I am a colorful value painter. Very few of my paintings are truly "flattened". I have posted one of my exceptions. At the time I thought I was doing "color as value" and working with pure hues but now I see that although the color has value, the value is not used to define the form in a 3 dimensional way so it is a color painting with pattern as texture. My previous post of Preston Metcalf was more of a true example of color as value.