Painting Demo - Artist/Author Catherine Gill

There will be a Demo of mixed water media tomorrow, March 18th - Friday at the Beaverton Art Media - Starting at 2pm.  Catherine will be showing a plein air style of painting she has perfected and teaches in the Ballard area (studio) of Seattle. She paints watercolor combined with soft pastel in a different way than you commonly see.  In her painting style, she incorporates the pastel into wet watercolor so as to disperse the pastel pigment within a watercolor wash.  This can be added to enhance complementary and analogous colors and effect transparent and opaque properties along with heightened intensity.  There are lots of examples in her newly released book - Powerful Watercolor Landscapes.  I hope people in the area can attend.  Catherine will be signing copies of her book available for purchase at Art Media.  I think it is a great book and I really urge you to attend this Painting demo Tomorrow afternoon.
PS:  It was a great demo and big turnout.  Catherine makes her technique look effortless.

Catherine's Book info

Stocking The Trout Pond

( Maybe I should have photo-shopped in some green in these bottles for St Patrick's Day!? ) A few weeks ago our Tuesday morning breakfast meeting had a great discussion about "Stocking the Trout Pond" You may or may not be familiar with the term or heard it said in a different way.   The  artist must develop a reservoir of ideas from which to glean  to produce works of art. We talked about how each of us go about filling our individual puddles;  reading or borrowing art books & magazines - visiting galleries and museums - taking art classes and attending lectures.  All very good ideas but you know, not anyone brought up the probably easiest and most obtainable, with just a pencil and paper, just Doodle! Do it every day.  I just remembered seeing John Salminen's sketchbook with pages and pages of little thumbnail drawings.  there were probably 30 to the page, no bigger than an oversize postage stamp, two or three values, and just shapes.  He said he did these while other stuff was going on, his pencil and hand just kept moving across the page.  Later, he may find one to develop into an abstract painting but it will most likely go through a few more incarnations in the final work.

(Bottle Doodle -  4 x 6 - pen &  ink)

Onions Tagged with Red.

  This painting has been signed framed and hung for the first time at O'Connors for the 'Eight+ group that shows there every other quarter.  It was painted a while back but I wasn't ready or didn't think it was finished till I saw it under glass.  I remembered from the Salminen workshop; he suggested it isn't enough to see a work only matted but to also look at it under plexi too to know if it really is finished...... well you also need to sign it!
  I'm taking down my old website in a couple days. It is linked to my first ISP and I'm going to discontinue that relationship in a couple days - I don't plan on having a router to keep things simple so if you have it book marked you can delete it and plan on seeing more content and pages added here.  It was nice of Earthlink to offer free web space and hosting for their old customers.

Madalain's Portrait

I saw Mimi wearing this adorable little blue vintage hat on her blog.  We've never met in person; We only know each other from Face book and the Wet Canvas Forum so I asked for permission to use the reference and paint her with a twist. I took a liberty with the shape of her mouth to go with her attire. This was very fun to do! Mimi  gave me her stamp of approval so here she is.  I did another twisted portrait last year if you want a reminder, look here.

Old Painting - WIP

This is an old painting that I discovered I still had the Work in Progress shots, at least the early ones.  The finished painting was a full sheet, horizontal format.  I recently removed it from the frame and thought about cropping it to a vertical.  I will lose her left hand that was on the rail in front of her but I think this stage of the painting below shows a more comfortable composition. What do you think?

Ten Minute Portrait

I thought if I did some quicker exercises it would cause me to let go a little.  I liked the bigger shapes and planes but I wish I would have let some of it dry before going in for the darks.  I think it's worth a couple more tries plus it was fun.

Toy Cars

 

These little cars appeared and multiplied like rabbits at my nephew's last birthday party.  I am pretty sure they are called hot wheels - They are relatively heavy and travel a fair distance - They do get under foot.  Looking closer, they have lots of detail and very fun to draw.

Today was the Oregon Society of Artists monthly luncheon and demo.  The theme this month is the figure and portraiture so James King did a demo of his style of figure drawing which is very nearly an animators style,  large shapes are broken down into butterflies and jelly beans and the outlines are a series of long intersecting arcs. Once you see his blog and I tell you he is an engineer it all makes sense.

Just Desserts

A couple times a month I get together with a couple painting/sketching buddies and we just paint whatever - It just depends on if we are at an outdoor cafe or meet over at Carolyn's after the breakfast meeting.  She had a box of Christmas candy, untouched!  ~Mouth watering!!  First, you paint it, then you eat it!  Thanks for stopping by and if you would like to see what my friends did, look here!       

(Just Desserts; Watercolor and Ink; 4 x 6)

Oh My Gravy

I didn't mean to take such a long hiatus from my posts but stuff happens.  I'll slowly get caught up to but in the meantime this was done in my sketch book yesterday out of my head.  'Anti Gravity' - 6 x 9. Graphite