FCA Calgary Chapter workshop with Alice Helwig

I attended a FCA Calgary Chapter workshop last Saturday and Sunday with Alice Helwig teaching about values and colour schemes. I really found the value part of the weekend really seemed to finally hit home for me. I can't do the "squinty eye" thing that everyone else seems to be able to do to see values and not details. My camera could do that for me as I found out. Using acrylic was a challenge as well but I learned more about using it therefore enjoyed it more.

 This exercise was to put different colours of the
same value. This is something I could never see until I viewed it on my camera in black & white. You can see where I painted a couple of brush marks in a darker value.




 This is the same exercise again using different colours and using white in the mix. The black and white study shows they are all a similar value.






These are photos of my palette as I am mixing, trying to get the same values with this wide range of colours.

Last still life in class

This was started in our last class. These beautiful treasures are Leila's and we both worked from them. I used sepia ink for the first time to paint the underpainting. The underpainting was painted with a decrepid oriental brush that had bristles going every direction! It is painted in acrylic on water colour paper 7 1/2 x 10 1/2

This is my second painting using the same still life, but with my camera as the resource. I really enjoyed this one as well. After the class critique, I added more colour into the white flowers as well as a transparent wash on the dark background. The background looks flat in this picture, but it has reds, blues and purples in the actual painting.

Still life in black and white

These 8" x 8" pictures were live studies painted in black and white acrylic. The pepper and small pear are done on watercolour paper with the under painting a bright red. The idea was to  cover the whole picture using only black and white values. I enjoyed how the bright red still added to the overall tone of the painting without seeing it.

This study was done with a bright green undercoating. It really makes you study an object when you don't have colour to describe it.

This is the final painting that I completed for an excersize for the Advanced Water Media Class I am taking with Sharon Lynn Williams. She has an excellent description on her blog, dated Nov 4 on http://sharonlynnwilliams.blogspot.com/. This is a class that is for advanced water colour or acrylic painters. I am just learning what acrylic can do. Go to the bottom of the post and follow it up for the steps taken. I am going to mat this picture for a fund raiser (silent auction) at our MRU Bachelor of Nursing program Christmas Luncheon.

I had to go back in and define the flowers hanging down near the table and put the edge on the vase again on mine. Flowers, leaves and stems were also defined more. I really learnt alot about transparent, translucent and opaque painting with acrylic. This is so different and so much more forgiving than watercolour.



The vase was highlighted with white and the flowers were defined further with transparent and opaque colours, really fun. This is the Sharon's finished picture.

More flowers were "defined/blocked in" on Sharon's picture again.

This was the next step (Sharon's picture). The whole painting is using the same 3 colours plus white. I painted the table using a transparent wash (with water). The blue background was an opaque with white. The "holes" were painted with the blue and the vase with opaque around the edges and transparent green (yellow/blue).

This is how we started this excerise, by splattering a red, blue and yellow, letting it dry and doing it again.The water colour paper was dry and we held our brushes sideways. I loved this part, just playing!