Personally, I found this exercise to be one of the BEST we've done in my classroom in a long, long time. I learned a lot from it, and I saw some wonderful things happening in my students' work, as well. I must give a hearty thank you to Carol Marine for this idea, which was one of the Daily Paintworks Challenges in February this year. I've admired her paintings for a long time and I know she's a busy workshop instructor. No wonder!
At the top is the sheet I painted yesterday and below are some close-up shots to show you the details. I found gouache to be a great medium for this experiment, although I was certainly tempted to use pastels. The ease of making color adjustments, as well as using edges and overlapping in pastel, lends itself to quick work, while the color shift and drying time of gouache may seem to work against you, but in actuality I think it resulted in some 'happy accidents' (a phrase I'm a bit tired of using...let's say
'pleasing incidents' instead.)
 |
| apple 1 |
 |
| apple 3 |
 |
| apple 5 |
Let me share some of the work done by my students. These were all in progress, and all are in pastel. Most of the divisions were in the 4"x6" range or smaller. We painted a total of 80 minutes yesterday, in 10-minute increments with breaks, of course. A few were a little frustrated at first, some just took off flying, and we all had to push ourselves to do the last couple of them, but in the end I think each of us benefited from this.
 |
| Annie's apples |
 |
| A couple by Carol |
 |
| Jaffa's red bottle |
|
|
 |
| Lisa's apples |
All in all, this was another good class. I hope those of you who are taking part remotely will try this one and find it as helpful as we did.
Good job, gang!
Deborah
PS I have had to
adjust this class schedule. Some dates have been changed and one class has been added, so please see the
Current Class Schedule page for details.
