Before I get to the usual news, I want to encourage all you painters out there to meet with us whenever you can. The group is populated by smart, talented, enthusiastic, supportive and fun people. We all benefit from this time spent together.
#15: Express a Mood
- I tried painting while listening to a Maria Muldaur CD. I thoroughly enjoy painting to music and often use it to set a mood, especially if I am working on something that will take some time. It sets a tone that I can match for the duration of the piece.
- Peg brought in painting of a specific model that inspires some of her best nudes. Hot, sweaty and strong!
- Marjorie wanted sparkle and to keep her whites no matter what, so used a combination of candle wax, frisket and salt. Her abstract was active and had a sense of depth within the colors. She was able to reconstitute her old frisket with water with no problems.
- Avelina celebrated her joy over the Gigantes winning with a painting of figures either dancing in the streets or engaging in an orgy, depending on how you held the paper. She followed up with another painting of a lady in the hills, either reclining peacefully or recovering from a hangover. Avelina is sometimes a wild woman.
- Carmel produced a lovely landscape, subtle and tranquil (not lonely) with a yellow sky.
Misc.
Carole was working on the exercise from the week before. She did create mud and there was a lot of discussion of how not to do that:
.Use paints with the least amount of pigments in the ingredients. For more information about pigment numbers, go to Pigments through the Ages
.Even in wet-on-wet, you can isolate the mixes to stay mostly with two colors. It's that third color that is the killer.
.Try the Cyan/Magenta/Yellow color wheel, instead of the Red/Blue/Yellow wheel.
Sue brought an abstract leaf/arrowhead/boat image that needed a background. She is thinking about stamping patterns or deep washes with a white outline around the edge of the form. She also showed some plein air landscapes in her carry-about book.
The Watercolor Artist Magazine for Dec 2014 has an article on using your blues that Avelina highly recommends. Here is a link to their website:Watercolor Artist December 2014 Issue
For those interested in Zentangle (the patterning/doodling we talked about) here is one of thousands of sites: Zentangle
Next exercise: #43 - Create Elusive Planes - pgs 116 + 118
Cheers, Shirley