Session #20 - the red pepper

Next object of our studies is a big red pepper, which seems to give headaches to the ladies to correctly get the three-dimensional shape translated into a good 2-dimensional drawing. A very good exercise, and wonderful paintings in the end (most of them not finished yet, to show them to you in the next post I guess). But we keep having fun, and the ladies dedicate more and more time at home to study watercolor - either painting or read about. I have a collection of Watercolor magazine (I used to have a subscription for many years) and the ladies get one of them each week to have a look at what professional watercolorists do. Most of them do not understand English, but still just looking at the pictures get them exposed to watercolor and various techniques, and makes them start wandering about how one or the other could be done, what colors should I use, etc.

And the surprise at this session was that we had 2 new-comers, that wanted to get a taste of our workshops and already register for the next year beginners workshop!
This alerted me about starting to prepare for the next year beginners workshop! We need, again, to look for some funding schema for our materials. Although it looks like this year we will get some materials through the Community Center (not sure what exactly yet), the needs of a new group are quite high and for sure we will need some help.
As far as I am concerned, I have already decided that I will keep do the workshop on the volunteer basis, and we will keep two groups in 2015-2016, the beginners and the advanced ones.

Session #19 - Pears

Pears and apples are of the most studied fruits by the artists: at some point in our learning path we all meet them! And again, every single painting is different. Difference is something that I encourage our group to aim for: after a few common ground directions about how to correctly draw the objects, about how to attempt paint the cloth behind the fruits and how to lay the washes to keep the light, I propose each lady to work with different colors, to find her own path. And, as you can see from the samples bellow, each painting in the end is a wonderful surprise - I am sure you would love to have them hangging on your walls (their children and grandchildren have started to ask them for custom orders!)!

Sessions #16, #17 and #18 - Drawing and painting from real life

I think one of the basic skills that a painter needs, no matter the medium, is drawing from real life. The easiest way to start with is to set up a simple still life, and try to decompose the objects in simple geometric shapes, such as sphere, cone, cube, cylinder, etc.
Having in mind not only to improve the drawing skills, but also to start look for light and shade to real object and try to render it in a painting, we choose a few simple things (pears and peppers) and added some more complex (glass bottle and sea shells) for more advanced drawing.

Moving around the setup to capture different compositions, and going close or far from the table were among the exercises we did in the first week:

Next week we combined the drawing with some work on the roses for the ones that missed some previous sessions:

Then, we practiced light with monochrome studies, and our paintings started to get some shape:

More work to do next week to finish the paintings, and move to other objects.