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.

Osher Figure Drawing with Model David

We had a wonderful exploration of the skeletal structure last Friday with model David.  For a warm-up, David posed with a life-sized resin skeleton we have affectionately named "Skelly Bones."

I asked my students to take the first minute of the 3-minute pose to lay in a stick drawing for David's skeletal structure in one color, then draw a loose gesture over top of that structure with a contrasting color for the remaining time.

Though I didn't draw Skelly Bones, David set up the skeleton to mirror his own pose for each of the standing gestures, and this guided us through the structure in David's form.

After the gestures, we moved on to study the legs, and practiced with laying in the structure, then making a gesture drawing, checking our measurements, and adding a bit of shading and detail, like the toenails.

We finished up with the long pose.

Many thanks to David for filling in on a snow day when our scheduled model couldn't get to the farm studio!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model Amelia

This week's focus of study was dealing with the challenge of foreshortening.  We warmed up with Amelia taking contrapposto standing poses for us-- the classic standing twist. By drawing with a continuous line, we could explore interior and exterior contours, and with our drawing implement always in contact with the paper, we could spend more time looking at Amelia and less at our paper.

We moved on to 4-minute wrapped-line drawings.  Rather than following the outer contours of Amelia's form, we imagined we were mapping the path of an ant crawling back and forth across Amelia, and so created a contour drawing.  This technique helps to understand the landscape of a foreshortened limb.

Amelia's final gesture of the series was quite foreshortened, giving us a great opportunity to test what we had been practicing.

We moved on to a 15-minute study of foreshortening -- the challenge of drawing a limb coming directly towards us.

We finished the class with a long pose of about 50 minutes (with breaks of course), and incorporated foreshortening into the pose as well as interesting background elements. 

Many thanks to model Amelia for a fantastic session with amazing contrapposto poses!

The Beauty of Limitations: Recent Gouache Paintings

I recently was inspired to try gouache after seeing some original paintings by Pittsburgh artist Joan Brindle at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination.  Her rich colors and lush landscapes drew me in.  I admired the way that she used repeated strokes in water ripples and grass stalks. 

I pulled out my 5 tubes of Winsor & Newton gouache: Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Cadmium Yellow Pale & White.

I laid a 3 x 3 grid over a reference photo, and cropped the image until I got a pleasing composition. After making a quick pencil sketch, I began painting.  

The limited palette would seem like a hindrance, but it turned out to be an artistic advantage.  I mixed the paint to match as close as I could to what I saw, but with only five colors, exact color matches weren't possible.  How freeing to know I couldn't be perfect, so I could focus on getting close enough.  

The resulting paintings had a wonderful feeling of unity and harmony due to the narrow color palette.  And because gouache is opaque, I could paint light colors over darker colors.  

The white clouds in the November scene above were created by leaving the paper unpainted, then adding shadows, but the light colored grasses along the roadway were painted over the green. I liked the effect of repeated grass strokes in pale yellow, green and indigo blue.

An autumn color scene.

Summertime goldenrods along the fence with the neighbors' cowpasture.

An Anglewing butterfly from a reference photo by Brad Silberberg.

A Canada Goose in winter from a reference photo by Brad Silberberg.

A new medium changes how we see possibilities, and gives us a new venue to express our creativity.

Osher Figure Drawing with Kathryn

We had a wonderful first class of the semester on Friday with model Kathryn.  We began with 2-minute mass gesture drawings.

I invited my students to turn their charcoal on its side and make broad strokes to express the masses within Kathryn's form.  I find this technique a good way to warm up at the beginning of a term.  It also helps us to explore the structure within the body rather than just looking at outside contours.

We added a minute to the gesture poses, and included some contours and shadows to bring definition to our drawings.

Then we changed gears to a more abstract approach, and chose 5 lines to represent Kathryn's 1-minute poses.

Now that we were warmed up, we worked on some longer studies.

It was wonderful to be back to drawing, and to have Kathryn's fantastic poses to keep us creating!

Self Care: Enchanted Tea Party

 

One of my favorite self-care tricks right now is the Enchanted Tea Party.  I brew up a pot of herbal tea, put on a fun outfit, and create! 

Recently, I took inspiration from the bold & contrasting colors in Lynne Perrella's book Artists' Journals & Sketchbooks (Quarry Books, 2004). 

I pulled out my art journal & art supplies, and began layering bright acrylic paints and bold markers, then glued on some text and hand-wrote a quote.  All while sipping delightful Elderberry-Lemon Balm tea.  Time drifted away, my body and mind relaxed, and I slipped into creative mode.  

The bold, bright colors spilled sunshine into my soul, and freed up my mind to play.

I even incorporated the quotes from the tea bag labels into my page spread.

The beauty of creating in my art journal for me is that I allow myself liberty to create anything I want to.  There are no rules, only techniques to explore & materials to play with.  If I don't like some element of a page, I can paint or collage over it.  Each layer adds interest.

I found a quote, and felt the rich vermilion and carmine reds invited such bold thoughts, so I wrote it in and added some decorations with permanent markers.

If you would like to join me for an in-person course in creating your own art journal, follow this link: https://ccbc.coursestorm.com/category/arts?page=2

For information about my upcoming in-person art classes, follow this link to the Community College of Beaver County website, and click on the "Arts" button: https://ccbc.coursestorm.com/ 

I would love to see you in one of my art courses!

Osher Figure Drawing with Model David

Friday morning, model David put us through our paces with his advanced gesture pose series. He began with a standing pose to let us get our bearings.

Then he began to creatively complicate the poses.

After he warmed us up a bit, David began throwing inventive poses with heavy foreshortening and unusual perspectives.  He said that these were poses he did for the more advanced students to challenge them to up their game, like this "shipwrecked" pose.

These curled up poses forced us to trust our eyes as we drew, and David quoted one of our favorite college drawing instructors who advised his students to, "Let your hand be an obedient servant of your eyes."

His poetic words rang true and helped us to focus on the process rather than the product.

 

We moved on to study drawing the feet.  A 15-minute pose gave us time to study the structure of the feet. For the first 3 minutes of the pose, I had David wear footie socks to hide any details of his feet.  We blocked in the shapes we saw, and then David took off the socks so we could finish our drawings with details.

We finished the session with an hour long pose (with model breaks). I used a 9XXB pencil on Charcoal paper.

Many thanks to model David for his creativity, inspiration and dedication to teaching the art of figure drawing!