Hi, ! Whenever I get into conversations with students about which pigments give them the most trouble, it seems like green is at the top! Why is that?
I think it's because when we're working with greens,
- We either have a "fake" green pigment that you don't see in nature anywhere or
- We're trying to mix a green on the fly or
- We're using one "convenience" green for all of the greens we seen in front of us!
We get frustrated and decide that green is overrated and we'll just not paint anything green! If this or something similar describes you, then it's time to make friends with green pigments!
This class will have four assignments with each one focused on different aspects of working successfully with green. This is a technique class rather than a destination class and while you have the option of applying what you're learning to destination artwork, that is not the focus of this class. We'll be working on getting a better understanding of:
Learning to mix vibrant, lively greens without mixing enough paint to cover the Eiffel Tower!
Why working with values is so very important
Why temperature is critical when working with greens to create depth in our images
Why convenience greens are not always a convenience
And a whole lot more!
I invite you to join me for a very green experience starting on Thursday, February 20th! To register for the class, please click here!
There's Still A Few Spaces!
Come and reconnect with your creativity on fuller and deeper levels...
There is somethingmuch to be said for immersing yourself into your art for ten days in a beautiful location in the southwest of France, for immersing yourself in a culture that celebrates "enoughness" (click here to
read a great article on enoughness!) and for giving yourself the chance to slow down and b-r-e-a-t-h-e.
I hope you will join me at Le Vieux Couvent in the Dordogne region of France next October to explore both France and more importantly, your creativity.
We'll explore our creativity and the area through our journals as we visit small villages, medieval towns, farmers' markets, brocantes, prehistoric cave art and so much more!
The gardens at LVC are wonderful to stroll through and simply admire, but I bet you'll soon find a small, quiet corner and to relax in. The buzzing of the bees and the warm sunshine might even convince you to take a nap!
Dining at LVC is an experience all in itself! From the picnic lunches to aperitifs to the four-course dinners filled with much laughter and story-telling will fill your heart and be long remembered after you return home.
The places you'll visit, the things you'll see and experience, the pages you'll fill in your journal, the food you'll taste...the whole experience is over-the-top fantastic. You will not want to come home after this workshop!
Come read all about the trip to see if it's the right thing for you and your creativity...
I wonder how many of you are like me and have bought oodles of tubes of paint over the years but only use the same, select few over and over? Well, as you can see in the image above, I have a lot of paint (and that's not even a tenth of it)!
Paint I don't use.
Paint that is beginning to harden and atrophy in the tubes it's so old...and that makes me unhappy.
I recently went looking for a tube of paint and found several others well on their way to be fossils.
My husband suggested selling the ones I do not use, doing a swap with someone or maybe donating them. And I was going to...until I stumbled across a new-to-me-again color I had forgotten about that was just marvelous and that started me wondering what else I was missing.
There might just be a "perfect" color in there mixed up with the masses! (Not likely, but one can always hope.) Curiosity is a dangerous thing!
So, I decided to set up a palette of all the paints I don't use on a regular basis. The reason most of them are not on a current palette is because I have something I like better, they're convenience mixes (and I already have the individual pigments on my current palette) or they are fugitive or unstable.
The palette I am using for this adventure is an old children's watercolor tin and it holds 70 full pans and would you believe that won't be enough?! I could probably come close to filling another 70 if I really wanted to, but I'd rather not.
There is no rhyme or reason as to the paint line up other than all the yellows, greens, etc., are grouped together. Because I knew the lack of organization would come back to bite me, I decided to do a layout on paper with a color swatch and pigment info in the same order as the palette.
That way, when I find that perfect color, I'll know just what to get!
I have also labeled each pan with the same info so that if for some strange reason a pan should be removed,* ahem, I'll know what was removed and where it goes in the scheme of things!
*I'm really bad about pulling pigments from various palettes and rearranging them and then not being able to tell what the pigment is because it's no longer in its original spot and it didn't get labeled!
So, the moral of this curious tale, if you want one, is this: If you have a surplus of paint tubes, I highly encourage you to take a look at them to make sure they're not petrifying and consider putting them out on a palette or passing them along to someone else!
P.S. Do you see all those tubes of green pigments?! And sadly, that's not all of them. Learning can get expensive—learn from my mistakes!
Happy painting, y'all, and I look forward to seeing you "in the classroom" and France!
