Lesson 73 - Painting a Floral without using a Brush

One of my mentors, Jean Sorensen, used to brag that she never used a brush in creating her paintings. She painted wonderful studies of trees and woodlands using stamping techniques and drawing with twigs and a palette knives. So for this lesson I decided to try using these techniques on a floral motif. The challenge was for everyone to experiment with new ways of creating texture patterns and to see if they could create something that looked like flowers without using a brush. We came up with lots of wonderful paintings. Here are a few.

Jean used a credit card and sponge to paint this arrangement.

Kay painted most of her piece with the edge of a cardboard strip. This was done on brown paper using white paint with the watercolors.

Anna cut out a potato in concentric circles and used it to stamp a pattern suggesting roses.

Bev made stamps from a wide variety of objects, including shoe soles and used these to create a vibrant design.

Lesson 72 - Palms in the style of Sargent

This lesson was inspired by a painting of palm trees by John Singer Sargent. I was interested in the variety of dark hues Sargent worked into his painting as well as the calligraphic brush strokes he used to represent palm fronds. We began with lesson by looking at Sargent's work and copying a bit of one of his palm paintings. Then was worked on a painting of palms from a photograph using his style.

Lavonne worked with a series of palms and used lots of warm darks.

Selma concentrated on one tree in front of a waterfall.

Celine has a pair of palms balanced by a small hill.

Carrie came up with a very stylized row of trees leaving lots of white areas.