New Youtube: Watercolor and Mixed Media

Please enjoy my little promo YouTube for my upcoming online class:  Watercolor and Mixed Media with the Artful Gathering Online Art Retreat, 2016.  I hope to see you in class!

Italian Memories - A Peak Inside Our Journals

Snow is falling softly outside.  I am at home in Oregon and I am finally getting around to share with you some of our beautiful, fun watercolor journals from our week with Adventures in Italy, September 2014.  We painted, played, lifted, cut and pasted, stamped, and just generally created wonderful artistic memories! 
Here are some photos from our fabulous watercolor / mixed-media journals:

Watercolor Series Class: Shape, Color and Value

Our watercolor series class continues

The focus this week is shape

Here is a great value study by Paula

Caroline is hard a work!

Beautiful study by Jan

Shape and Color!

The Elements of Design

One of my favorite classes to teach is how to use the Elements of Design.  The are the building blocks that make up your painting.  The ones that I like to work with are: Value, Color, Shape, Line, Texture, and Pattern.  In each class we focus on one of the elements and emphasis that element.
Value is a good one the start with.  Value is simply the lightness or darkness of colors.  Using value pens we make small value sketches of our subject.  Here is an example of a value sketch.  Notice that it is just a simple sketch using white, grays and black.  This shows me where I want to emphasis the values in my painting.
Next we paint our painting using one color and just focus on getting lights and darks with that one color.

Here are some photos from our fun value class.

Adding Texture to Your Paintings

Textured Stone Wall and Red Door

It is fun to play with different ways to add texture to your watercolor paintings.  Sprinkle, Splash and Splatter; Creating Texture with Watercolor, is one of the workshops that I am offering at CREATE, Chicago this Friday, August 23, 2013.  "Texture Stone Wall and Red Door" is just one of the step-by-step examples of one of the exercises that we will be painting in this workshop.