I've been preparing for my upcoming class "Watercolor Flowers" by gathering supplies, filling palettes with watercolors, and playing with ways to paint flowers with watercolor.  The class begins this Saturday morning at the Community College of Beaver County, and is full, but there are lots of other artful classes at CCBC.  

You can check them out here: https://ccbc.coursestorm.com/

At this monochromatic time of year, the simple act of squeezing out tubes of watercolor paint into little wells lifts my spirits. 

The invigorating presence of fresh flowers in my studio feels like Spring -- nourishing for this artist's soul!

Why not buy yourself a bouquet of fresh flowers, and explore the colors within these jewels?

Wishing you many happy hours painting!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model David

 

Once again, a scheduled model couldn't make it to our home studio for an Osher class -- this time due to work calling the model in at the last minute.  David came to the rescue and served as our model.

We started with 3-minute gestures.

As David created more abstract poses, I was drawn to expressing them with blind contour.

For this crouched, egg-shaped pose, I used blind contour exclusively.

All warmed up, we moved into long poses. David began with a standing 20-minute pose.

After a break, we finished up with an hour-long pose.

Many thanks to model David for rescuing the class again!

Happy Valentines Day!

One of my favorite holidays, today is a day about love & eating chocolate, so it has long inspired me to make cards for friends and family.

I painted a variety of papers with acrylic paint, stamped with handmade heart stamps and commercial stamps, and created collage cards.

The best thing about collage is that you simply allow your right brain to nudge you towards different colors, materials and shapes.  My mantra was "There's no such thing as perfect."  

Get your creation close to "perfect," and start gluing things down!

Wishing you a Happy Valentines Day!

Osher Figure Drawing -- Portraiture with Model Robin

 An impromptu visit from my best friend, Robin, intersected with an ice storm that kept my scheduled portraiture model from being able to travel to my home studio, and the result was a wonderful class on drawing the face and head.

My dear friend stepped in to fill the gap, and we began with 1 minute gestures of the structure of Robin's head in various different poses -- looking up, looking down, presenting profile and front-on views.

We then took 2 minutes to create more developed gesture drawings of just Robin's head and neck, refining our sketches and adding in more details.

My final 2-minute drawing was beginning to look more like Robin.

I demonstrated how to draw the face and head in more detail including the placement of the features, and studies of each in the front-on view and in profile.

We finished up the session with a long pose of about an hour.

Many thanks to my dear friend, Robin!

Winter Spells Art Retreat

I recently signed up for an artist's retreat called "Winter Spells," designed to to reconnect participants with nature and our creativity. After teaching so many classes, it feels exciting to be the student, open to new inputs and approaches.  

The 2-day, virtual retreat is offered by Amy Maricle of Mindful Art Studio, who has given us all homework.  In preparation for our February retreat, we are invited to take walks, noticing nature around us, taking it all in, and then creating  -- in written entries, drawings, paintings, or even singing and dancing.  

I've begun taking walks outdoors in nature with the sole purpose of slowing down and noticing.  I often take my nature journal with me and fill it with observations and sketches.  

These sketches below were from a hike I took in Raccoon Creek State Park on a snowy day.

It felt so uplifting to spend time in nature with no other plan than to listen to the songs of the Tufted Titmouse drift, and sketch the scenes that drew my eye in. I had forgotten how healing it could be to just sit still in nature.

I hiked up to the closed campground and sat on a picnic bench to sketch this gnarled, old maple trunk, my mind only following the crazy contours -- a drawing meditation.

I noticed that beautiful details popped into focus as I hiked -- the tiny windblown seeds that dotted the snow like confetti, a snakeskin hanging from a maple sapling, eight feet up.  

I came home refreshed, energized, and delighted to have tapped back into nature journaling in a new way.  What a delight to take someone else's course, and feel cheered on and led by another artist.