Northwest by Northwest Gallery

My paintings are now shown at Northwest by Northwest Gallery in Cannon Beach Oregon. I'll be at the gallery October 3rd from 1-3pm. If anyone from the Bay Area is heading up that way, please let me know - also check out the link below!
http://coastexplorermagazine.com/news.php?id=116

Lesson 49 Whimsical Animals

The challenge for this lesson was to create a series of four paintings of farm animals which might be appropriate for greeting cards or a children's book. Sometimes it is as difficult to create a drawing that looks simple and whimsical as it is to paint something more realistically. We began by doing a series of quick two minute studies from photographs of farm animals. For the first group we did contour, outline drawings with pen; for the second group we used brush and puddles of paint to do quick silhouettes. For the final drawings we sketched in pencil, outlined in ink and added a flat, wet wash which we tried to keep 'out of register' with the pen lines.

Claire left lots of white but we are still able to make sense of the pose.

Nancy added bits of red in the wet wash on the sheep.

Jeff left unpainted areas on the face and back and worked with two colors in his wash.

Carrie used different weight pen lines and bold green color for her goat.

Lesson 48 agricultural fields

Rows of crops make interesting design elements to work with. The rows can lead the eye into deep space or around the contours of hills or can serve as patterns in a design of shapes.
When rows converge on a vanishing point it is important to have other strong elements balance the overall design. In Lynn's painting, the rows converge on the left and she as added yellow trees and a foreground post to the right to create balance.

Mary Ann had a similar problem and she found dark tree shapes on the left to create balance.

In Jessalyn's painting and field rows lead the eye left, then right to the upper trees which take the viewer across to the large foreground tree.

Jean's foreground rows act as a stripped pattern which is repeated in the cypress trees

More paintings of collages

Bev was not happy with the image of her unfinished painting which I posted last week and asked me to post the more polished version. Here it is -

Clair and Jean also brought in paintings of their collages which they had worked on during the week. Here is Claire's -


And Jean's -

Lesson 47 - Linking Value Shapes

One way to organize material for a strong composition is to think in terms of light or dark shapes
that are linked to each other and carry the eye through the painting. For this exercise we began with a magazine photo of an interior scene. We cut this up into random pieces and rearranged the segments so that dark shapes touched dark shapes and light touched light. We added smaller pieces to complete the linkage of lights and darks. Finally we worked on a painting of the design we had created.
Here is Bev's collage. Notice how the dark shapes are all connected.

And here is her painting.

Leslies's collage had interconnecting light areas.

Here is the beginning of Leslie's painting. I like the variations of the grid pattern.

Emily had some strong colors to work with in her collage.

Here is Emily's painting.