Registration Open for a NEW Acrylic Painting Online Class: “Birds on Birds”

Hi Everyone!

We are delighted to introduce to you a new teaching artist, Alison O’Donoghue from Portland, Oregon. We recently returned from filming her first class, “Birds on Birds in Acrylic Painting.” 

Alison’s work is just amazing… I hope you can join us!

Carla

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“Birds on Birds: Acrylic Painting”
with Alison O’Donoghue
Two-Week Class; 6 Video Lessons; $85

Class Dates: October 20-31, 2015

Join painter Alison O’Donoghue for a super fun class in acrylic painting, “Birds on Birds.” Alison shares her unique techniques for creating a stacked, interactive, and harmonious world within the bounds of an 11″x14″ wood panel. She will guide you expertly through six lessons — starting with preparing the panel with layers of gesso and finishing with varnish; and in-between, magic!

Alison likes the stacking up method of composing because it allows for a lot of images within the painting without any concerns for traditional perspective (a common folk art approach around the world). Through Alison’s process of layered washes and highlights, your painting will glow with light and color.

Plus… BIRDS!

Click here for more info: Join this class today!

A detail:

And more of Alison’s “bird” work using these techniques (click to enlarge):

Class Itinerary

Lesson 1 – Supplies & Preparing Your Board
We’ll go over the supplies needed for this project and prep your board for painting.

Lesson 2 – Drawing It Out
Here is a place to begin letting the ideas flow. Your birds don’t have to be realistically drawn and you can let go of the idea of right and wrong; instead do it your way. You do have a way.

Lesson 3 – Painting the Simple Shapes
Create a palette of color choices ahead of time and have fun with color! It’s good to be aware of the negative spaces — or spaces between — the objects and imagery, because they are as important as the birds in creating a balanced and vibrant composition.

Lesson 4 – Painting the Negative Shapes
In this lesson you will create lines around your birds by NOT painting the lines, and paint in the negative shapes of the background.

Lesson 5 – Transparent Color Washes
This part is really fun, and here is where the dimension, volume, sense of light and shadow and nuance are begun. We are staining the shapes we have painted with the washes. (It may feel as though you’re ruining the painting, but you aren’t!)

Lesson 5 – Highlights and Details
In this step, my favorite step, we are adding a final  layer to bring out the form, as well as adding pattern to some of the shapes. Add spots, stripes, patterns or follow the form of the object to highlight the form. All of this will create depth, a push and pull and sense of shifting light that is exciting and interesting to the eye. We’ll finish with a nice coat of varnish to give your painting more luminosity.

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The artwork of Alison O’Donoghue can be described as contemporary folk art.

Partly naïve, sometimes illustrative, at times cartoony, with some of her pieces being heavily patterned. Her paintings are mostly playful with creatures and people that are quite often glowing with life… awash in dimensional color and shade in a mostly two dimensional world. In many of her paintings, she combines everyday objects such as; cups of coffee, fruit, plants, humans, birds and odd, made up animals, into a fluid motion of interaction of intertwined shapes. The playful next to the sinister, give the paintings a sense of humor and the complexity of an unfolding story. Alison lives in Portland, Oregon. http://www.aliorange.com/alison.html

The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams: New Book by Cat Bennett (and a call to action!)

Today I received a copy of Cat Bennett’s newest book, “The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams: How to Create a Club for Art.” In this book Cat writes beautifully about her philosophy of creativity and drawing, and then offers three, 8-week session plans for those who might like to start an art club of their own.

Cat writes in her preface:

Ten years ago, I was invited to teach drawing at The Arsenal Center for the Arts, just outside Boston. Every week, I set up ways in which we could explore drawing without concern for predictable results. For instance, we’d draw with our eyes closed or paint with tree branches or make group drawings. The results were often improbable; that is they were more fantastic and cheering than we might have predicted. Some of us were rank beginners, some experienced artists. We all worked together and the bigger the chances we took, the more we learned to embrace ourselves just as we are and where we are. No small feat.

You can see that Cat and I share a mission! We both know and want to share how drawing and making art can help us know ourselves more fully:

To me, [drawing] invites us to forget ourselves and open up to seeing what is. It helps us imagine and envision in ways words can’t. Inside all of us who draw and make art is this feeling that drawing takes us somewhere, to a place of truth and perception….

Many of us give up drawing when we’re just kids. If we had more instruction or support, many more of us might never give it up. Some of us find other ways of being, of course; there are many great ways to live. But some of us need art, and we can begin again. Those of us who have kept drawing will have more developed skills but there’s always more to explore. For all of us, if we have desire, we can do something with it. We all have limitations and even with them we can all find our genius—the place we meet and act without hesitation on the inspiration that comes to us

Cat is a wonderful teacher with a deep connection to creativity and how it can help us become truly our unique selves as artists. I am being a bit shameless here, urging you to consider taking her FIRST online class,

“Making Art a Practice,”

but I think anyone who signs up and participates will be touched and transformed by Cat’s gentle and wise shepherding!

This is a six-week class with one video lesson per week, with several exercises to keep you creating daily in your sketchbooks until the next lesson. Cat will be right in the trenches with you, too!

I’m going on this journey with you as a full participant. I’ll post additional inspiration each weekday too as well as my drawings. I so look forward to seeing what you do and hearing your thoughts in the discussions we have. It’s going to be fun. And we’re going to bring something wondrous back to our art, and our lives, from our time together.

Class begins Tuesday, October 6th. Won’t you join us?

Figure Drawing with Ellen Borison

I think one can never do enough figure drawing.

I certainly never do enough!! 😀

So this fall I signed up for a class with Seattle artist Ellen Borison, through Arts East. We had our first session a little over a week ago and — wow! — I just loved Ellen’s approach. She gave us unique and innovative exercises, which kept things moving and is just the kind of drawing class I like to be in.

With these three, we were to tear the figure in paper first and glue down to our papers. Next, we just drew in the highlights in chalk. And finally, we finished with line.

Thank you, Ellen!

And, Seattleites: There is still room… sign up! (No affiliation here, I just think she is wonderful!)

Ink & Eyedropper Drawings

#5

#9

#13

#21

Hi everyone! Happy Monday.

These four drawings are the best of 25 drawings I did in under an hour as part of an assignment for the Spark! class… at the time I was working on Lynn Whipple’s “Wordplay” class and so was inspired to put words in (#5 and #21), and I had recently been bit by a dog as well (#9). But I don’t know where #13 came from!

I hope you have a wonderful week!

My Dogs

Hello everyone!

The above “list painting” is totally inspired by Lynn Whipple’s current Wordplay class… I am so inspired after filming our artists that I usually go right home and do the assignments (though this is a simplification of Lynn’s assignment).

Recently I have been revisiting my childhood in lots of my sketchbooks, and this list is “mostly” dogs I had as a child (all but Roxy)… sweet and sad memories both with this list, as all of our dogs lived too-short lives for one reason or another. 😦

I’m of a mind to delete that last paragraph (a downer!), but it is what it is, and art lets us process these things.

Yay, art!

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

Introducing a NEW Teacher, Cat Bennett!

We have a wonderful new teacher in our lineup, Cat Bennett from Boston, MA! She is teaching a 6-week online class on working in our sketchbooks. Please consider joining us! NOTE: Cat is offering to send a copy of her book, “Making Art a Practice” to the first 10 people who sign up! We’ve got the first 10… thank you!

“Sketchbooks: Making Art a Practice” with Cat Bennett
Six-Week Class; 6 Video Lessons
Class Dates: October 6 – November 10

How can the sketchbook be a place of discovery and growth in our art practice?

In Cat Bennett’s 6-week course, “Sketchbooks: Making Art a Practice,” we’ll use the sketchbook to explore how to make our art practice a vital one. We’ll draw and paint in experimental ways, find inspirational images to include in our sketchbooks, look at where we’ve been and where we might go, and consider how to grow our ideas for our art. We’ll also grow our drawing skills and discover our own best strengths so we can build on them.

Each lesson includes a video with demonstrations of various drawing and painting techniques, regular assignments, and a Facebook group to share sketchbook explorations. Cat will also offer daily inspiration (Monday to Friday) with general comments on the work and some further exercises for the super motivated!

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Making Marks—Drawing in an abstract way to grow our creativity.

Week 2: Drawing Nature—Exploring different ways to draw what we see.

Week 3: Drawing Our Daily Life—Finding what speaks to us.

Week 4: Portraits—Drawing people and finding our own style.

Week 5: Bringing in Imagination—Playing with images and growing our vision.

Week 6: Growing Our Ideas—Tracing our art history and seeing where we might go.

Each week, Cat also addresses issues we all face as artists—

1. What can we do when we feel blocked?
2. How can we overcome the inner critic or feelings of inadequacy?
3. How can we find the time to make art in the midst of busy lives?
4. How do we find our own style in our art?
5. What are great reasons for making art?
6. How do we keep our art practice vital?

Participants can also share positive suggestions of their own each week regarding these questions and on the Facebook page.

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Join this class today, and spend 6 weeks together with Cat Bennett! CLICK HERE.
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Cat Bennett is artist and author. In her Saturday Morning Drawing Club, she teaches drawing as a way to meet the true creative self. Her book, The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind, published by Findhorn Press 2010, was a gold medal winner in the 2011 Nautilus Book Awards. Her book Making Art a Practice: How To Be the Artist You Are, and her newest book, The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams: How to Create a Club for Art, are also published by Findhorn Press.

Cat worked as an illustrator/designer for about thirty years. Her illustrations have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun and Time Magazine, Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic, Harcourt Brace and many other publications. She has also made short animations for CBC-Sesame Street, Nickelodeon TV, WHDH-TV, WGBH-TV and various non-profits. She has exhibited her art in group shows in Boston, New York, and Tokyo.

Her essays have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, LA Yoga Magazine, Yoga Magazine UK, Integral Yoga Magazine, Red, The American, Lightworker, High Spirit Magazine and others. www.catbennett.net

Check out Cat’s wonderful books (#3 is forthcoming October 13, 2015).

          

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We feel really lucky to be working with Cat! If you would like to get to know Cat even better, listen to her INTERVIEW with “Choosing to Be Fit” site HERE.

Lynn’s Whipple’s New “Word Play” Class Begins Tomorrow!

Word Paintings…

List Paintings…

Poem Paintings…

Character Paintings…

Book Cover Paintings…

… and Pulling-it-all-Together Paintings…

Does this sound fun? Then check out Lynn Whipple’s new class, “Wordplay Painting,” HERE!

As Jobs Go…

As jobs go, I have a pretty good one:

• I work for myself, which means, mostly, I can start my day when I naturally wake up. (During “live” class weeks, this is later and later, as Steve and I are often up well past midnight finishing a night’s lesson.)

• I get to work with talented, caring artists and get first insights into how they think and work.

• I get to play at my studio table and call it “research,” and write off all of my art material purchases.

• I get to work with my husband/best friend, and I get to dress how I want most days (usually just one step up from pjs).

Like all of life, though, these benefits have their flip sides: a lack of routine can become unbalancing; people are people and there can be difficult conversations; I never spend enough time at my studio table; Steve and I sometimes butt heads; and not getting dressed up each day has a psychological effect on me, not always positive.

One of my favorite statements I’ve read about an Indian artist was, “All his weaknesses are his strengths.” (So sorry, I’ve lost the reference.)

But I think it’s just as true that all of our strengths are our weaknesses, too…

I think life is so amazing that way…

 

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Elephant Parade

Recently I did a bunch of watercolor paintings in one timed sitting in preparation for a Spark assignment:

After a while I settled on elephants, trying to get the “perfect” one…

I got…

Elephants Grumpy,

Elephants Sad,

Elephants Strange,

and Elephants Mad!

Though I liked many of my elephants, the best one of the day (to me) looked more like an anteater!

In any case, it was a great assignment to do… 25 watercolor paintings in 2 hours… you should try it!

Artwork for Sale at Etsy

Hi everyone!

Over the summer my daughter-in-law, Christi, began adding originals and prints to my long-neglected etsy site! 

It’s pretty full now with lots of stuff!

I don’t have a gallery presence anymore (it’s hard to do everything, and my focus has been on the online classes), and some of this work has been sitting in boxes for five years… it’s time to let it go!

Christi is getting paid on commission, so please know that any purchase helps a young family get on their feet!

Thank you for taking a look!

Happy day to you!