"Some Days All We Do Is Mix Pretty Colors"

Today was show and tell day.  It was the close to a beautiful week that began with one more painting session.  All painting needed to stop well before noon so all brushes could be washed and stations could be cleaned and moved before we left for lunch.
Before we began, we went around the table with Kit again as she handed us "Kit's Painting Rules" as well as the "Ten Rules for Students and Teachers".  I absolutely loved the rules sheets she gave me.  They were an inspirational and awesome way to end what was an incredible and challenging class.
 Two things not in the rules but that Kit shared with us during this discussion were "Be careful what your diet of art is" and also...

"Some days all we do is mix pretty colors, then paint with them"

I worked to finish the loose hair pieces on Sarah and played with the flowers before I hung up my work.  Knowing me, I could work on it and tweak it for another week.  I had wanted to finish more than two paintings, but I am happy with what I completed this week.  Here it is!

This picture collage was created by Kilolo!  Thank you!

Here is some of the brilliant artwork from my oil painting classmates!

Theresa and her beautiful work!  Love those palette paintings!

Nicoletta's awesome pieces.  I don't know how she whips them out so quickly.

Colleen's pieces.  Gotta love those poppies!

Jude's awesome work, full of unique narrative and humor.

Jen's versatile artwork, just outstanding!

I am so proud of our class!!!

I have so enjoyed working with these wonderful women!

I love us laughing <3



Following lunch, it was our time to present our work first to the other workshops at aTi.  I was asked to speak about skin tone, since I was fixated on that for most of the week.  




Nicoletta Explaining the palette set up

                  Theresa explaining the color mixing chart                  Jude explaining her subject matter choices

                   Jen explaining glazing in her paintings                      Colleen explaining her palette knife techniques

And of course we couldn't do this at all without our Master Oil Painting 

Artist and Teacher, Kit Sailer.

Following our presentation, we were excited to view the work our classmates completed throughout the course of the week.  Next we moved onto photography

Next we moved onto printmaking.
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The personal and creative work from Erica




Next we move on to Kinetic Sculpture




I will soon figure out how to post my music videos from the music writing and drumming class.


I cannot begin to describe how valuable this experience was.
I cannot thank my instructor, Kit Sailer, enough for her patience, her creativity, and her wisdom.  Thank you to aTi for leaving me invigorated and ready for the next school year.  I am so thankful for my classmates and aTi participants with which I had the opportunity to get to know and share in this experience.  Thank you to Wendel for printing me a color mixing chart, which I promise to complete!  Finally, thank you to my husband Anthony for understanding and supporting my artistic passions.

Turn Her Upside Down

Isn't it funny how you can say something over and over and yet when it applies to you, you may not necessarily realize it until someone else brings it to your attention?  I am constantly telling my students to turn their work upside down.  I believe it helps students to recognize spatial distances, appropriate colors, accurate shapes, etc that they may simply overlook when they work to make their work look like something/someone they "know".  

And so Kit suggested to me after a while that I get a different perspective by looking at my subject matter and painting upside down.  I knew I still had a lot of lights to plug in, my nose was too small, my mouth was too dark, but somehow looking at it upside down made it even more glaringly obvious.  I appreciated the change in perspective as I continued my Friday.

When we returned from lunch, we began our discussion about the questions Kit asked us to explore.  We sat in a circle and used our phones to show our picks for Trite, Traditional, and Innovative, as well as what we liked best and least, and how important subject matter, medium, and style were to the work.  

These were the pieces I shared as we went around the circle expressing our findings.

I don't want to focus too much on the artwork we spoke about, but I will say that this piece above was probably my favorite piece out of the group of work that was shown.  The piece was called "poolside" and I thought the concept and the humor in this image were really amusing.  I also used this image as my "innovative" choice.  

Over the course of the afternoon, I played with the forehead, the eyebrows, and the cheeks quite a bit.

One thing I realized was that I kept winding up wanting the same silly color that I would run out of, so I finally made a bigger pile of it to work with.

After dinner, when I came back a little early, I took a couple pictures in the hallway.  I liked the concept that from grade school, to college, to teacher workshops, we are still playing with color theory, we are still, in some cases, working with a single shared concept.  Yet, there is always more to learn.

Here is one of Kit's paintings in progress.

I worked in the studio with Colleen until close again this night.  

The week was a marathon, and it wasn't over yet.

Glazing and The Rules

Thursday began with a discussion of completing a painting.  Kit introduced us to the "rule of least doneness" and how it applies to your work.  For instance, in my painting, my hair was not even started so Kit insisted I plug the hair in before I did anything else.

This discussion was followed by a demonstration on glazing.  What a cool way to change your color.  Glazing is typically done with Liquin now.  Liquin dries quickly and has a glossy sheen to it.  If you are not seeking a glossy look, a little bit of wax could be added.

Glazes can be used to:

• change a color
• darken an area
• add color
• soften details
• add details

Glazes are most often done with transparent pigments, and Kit explained to us how to determine how transparent the paints are using the boxes on the tubes.

Important things to remember about glazing:

• a small amount of wax added to the liquin will produce a satin finish
• use very little paint
• dark over light works better than light over dark
• wait 24 hours before adding another glaze on top

Below was my favorite quote of the day, or perhaps the entire workshop.  One of my classmates asked Kit a question about glazing and her response was this

 "I gave you all of the rules you needed to hear"- Kit Sailer

I just absolutely love that quote.  I find that I am a serious culprit with wanting more and more clarification on the way something should be done, and I often have students that ask more and more questions to clarify until the answers may put them "in a box" creatively.  The concept of only needing a couple rules and determining the rest for yourself was very meaningful to me.

This picture was taken after lunch.  I had just started adding a little bit of the bathing suit due to the rule of least done-ness.  

After lunch, Kit gave us an explanation on painting surfaces available for oil paints.  There were some that I recognized, and others I had never heard of.  I had never considered gluing canvas onto hardboard, and I really like that idea.  I am also interested in painting on unique materials, and I was very interested in how my classmate Colleen was progressing on her wood panel painting.  

I also had never heard of Arches oil paper, but that sounds like an awesome surface to try.

Following this conversation, I was back to the canvas.  Once the hair and the bathing suit were plugged in, everyone was still very upset that Sarah had no eyeballs, so I plugged those in.

It was suggested to me that I needed more warm colors in Sarah's hair so I went back in and added layer after layer.  I found that I kept staring at it and saying "What is the next lightest color!?" 

 Sometimes art can be much more like a math equation than you'd think.  I felt like I'd wind up with a close answer in my color mixing but it wasn't the right answer.

Throughout this process, I put a lot of pressure on myself.  I love portraiture and I work on portraits probably more than anything else, but I had never created a portrait with oil paint, and I had not been all that confident in oil painting back in college.  I found that I wanted to make it as close to "right" as possible, and it wasn't happening fast enough for my liking.  On my way home, this day, my mom spoke to me on bluetooth and said to me "you do know that it's going to take you more than four days to master this, right?"  While absolutely true, it was a lot to take in.  I had wanted to move onto painting 3, maybe do a palette painting, but I did not feel as though I would feel satisfied if I moved on too early from this challenge.  

It was this night that I had a heart to heart with a couple of my classmates.  I was greatly blessed to be offered the opportunity to meet and learn from these wonderful, passionate, women.  The comradery I experienced with these artists and teachers has grown lasting relationships and I truly appreciate the insights and input from these brilliant people.   

Skin Tone and Tone of Your Subject

On Day 3, I woke up to a beautiful view out my hotel room window and got ready for class.  I was excited to visit the printmaking studio first thing in the morning to view the handmade goods from the Swat Valley of Pakistan.  Between 2008 and 2010, the Taliban brutally overtook the region and destroyed hundreds of girls schools.  These events were followed by a refugee crisis and devastating flood.  My incredible printmaking instructor from aTi 2015, Eileen Foti, brought the Swat Valley Relief Initiative to my attention last year.  I purchased a necklace and wool thoosh last year and this year, when I heard of the impact the purchase of beautiful handmade jewelry, embroidery, and bags had on the girls, and some boys(who gained skills in leather tanning) thanks to our contributions, I was eager to support their mission again.  I was lucky to find two beautiful necklaces, a bracelet, and a wallet, all absolutely ornate and original.

 Once I arrived to class, Kit showed us how to make the basic formula for a flesh tone by using cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow, and white.  From this base, warm or cool shadows can be created using Chrome green or Alizarin crimson,  For a darker shadow, the master color without white can be combined with either Chrome or Alizarin.  Kit showed how highlights are also warm or cool, and warmer highlights have more red, while more yellow can also be added for cool highlights.

Using these methods, Kit created an entire face using light and dark, and then created a face using darker skin tones,  The base color for these skin tones is Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium yellow, and little to no white with Chrome green added to create a rich colorful brown.  In this case, Ultramarine blue can be added for cool shadows, and Alizarin crimson with a little Ultramarine can be added for warm shadows.  Some shots of Kit gradually demonstrating are shown below.

 

Throughout this demo, Kit showed us how she first sets up the horizontals of the face, as they are parallel.  The widows peak, eye line, clef, and chin are in line.  She also showed us how important the shadow under the nose is and how she uses paints grey for the whites of the eyes.  

Following this demonstration, I got to work on the grass of my background.  I, in no way, planned to or wanted to spend so long on the background of this work, but I found the concept of dark to light to be extremely difficult to abide by since I kept noticing new and different greens that were in the way of getting to the light as quickly as possible.  

I was so looking forward to lunch to take a break from my sea of green, and from playing with "grass looks like this in the picture" and "maybe it doesn't have to look like the picture".  Ugh I was sick of grass.

On the way to lunch, we noticed that there were a whole bunch of beautiful, colorful, bee boxes.  Apparently, the week-long Eastern Apicultural Society of North America conference was taking place at Stockton at the same time as our Artist Teacher Institute.  I had never seen more colorful hives!

Since the EAS is "all about bee education" as one of their members told me, here's a little bit about the society:     
The Eastern Apicultural Society of North America, Inc. (EAS) is an international nonprofit educational organization founded in 1955 for the promotion of bee culture, education of beekeepers, certification of Master Beekeepers and excellence in bee research. EAS is the largest noncommercial beekeeping organization in the United States and one of the largest in the world.

I absolutely loved the colors of these boxes

On the way back, things got even more exciting!  We were told that there had been a queen placed on this tree, and this was making the bees very excited!  One of the members called it a "simulated hive".

One of the bee officials saw that myself and some of my classmates were taking pictures of the swarm and offered to take me for a walk up to the tree to get a closer shot.  I was nervous at first, of course, but he said that as long as I walk slowly, they won't bother me at all.  However, as soon as we got to where we were going, he did tell me "you have quite a bit more hair than I do, so if you get a bee stuck in your hair, don't worry, I'll get it out."  Now THAT made me a little nervous.

Look how close I was!  If you can see it, the tiny green area on the right side of the tree seemed to be where the queen was.  I am not sure at all how the queen got there or who placed her there or why everyone went crazy, but it was awesome all the same.

I am trying to upload the videos I took.  In the last one, the man I spoke with offered for me to do a "bee beard".  I didn't know at the time that it meant this(below) but I was happy my response was "I'd like to see someone do it, and take pictures!"

Yea... I'm good without doing that...

Here are a couple more pics of the field where all the excitement took place.  It is easier to see the green queen from this vantage point.

Once we got back from our bee-filled excursion, we were ready to begin!  We started with a conversation of subject matter.  As an exercise last year, I had been told about the concept of Trite, Traditional, and Innovative subject matter.  The concept alone last year gave me enough to hold conversations with my students in the beginning of the year.  It had been a homework assignment for aTi students to come up with a subject and determine a trite, traditional, and innovative subject matter.
For instance, with the subject "Dog", trite would be a hallmark picture of a puppy, traditional would be a regal picture of a hunting dog, and perhaps another dog (since I can't remember what she originally said would be innovative) would be this ...

After class on Wednesday, the Stockton Art Gallery had agreed to open for our group, and Kit had a plan for us to determine answers for a couple questions based upon the artwork.

She had us write down the following questions for us to consider and then discuss during a later workshop day:

What piece do you like the best?  The least?
Select 1 piece, determine how important these things are:

• subject matter
• medium
• style

• Take pictures of the trite, traditional, or innovative images
• Find an idea you can steal

Kit then showed us a really awesome "creativity jump-start" activity.  She had an idea to help us to come up with different visual concepts.  The process began by first choosing an object out of an object bag and a subject out of a subject bag.  The object was a noun of some sort, while the subject could be an emotion or an action, etc.  Then, you have 10 minutes to combine those two words into four different visual images.  Kit did three different examples with us using the object airplane and the subject fear.

The first was the fear of an airplane crashing into water, then it was the fear of sitting between two really big people and being squished, and then the 3rd fear was of sitting next to someone that died while on the plane.  After these examples, we were ready to start.

The words I picked out of the bags were book and eating.  In 10 minutes, I needed four drawings(it's important to mention here that Kit said drawing didn't count!!).

First, I thought of someone eating a meal they made after following the recipe in a cook book, then I thought of someone eating a book, then someone eating pizza next to a book, and then someone eating a slice of pizza in a picture, in a book.  This is a really fun exercise, and I'd recommend it to anyone.  Here is what my creative class came up with!

See if you could guess what the words were for each!

Once we completed this exercise, 

we got back to our paintings.

right before she went peach

and after

After I added some shadows, it was time to head to the gallery for our assignment.  (to be discussed on Friday)

After our gallery outing, I stopped at starbucks drive through(which I got to know pretty well over the course of this week) for a panini and returned to the studio.

Things got a bit creepy as I layered in the dark shadows and then the light and dark highlights.

I knew at this point that I was moving a bit slow.  After weeks of playing with watercolors at home, the complete opposite process of oil painting was more than a little daunting.  And as much as I wanted to loosen up my style, I wanted to make Sarah look like Sarah.. I knew that I could eventually.. and unfortunately it might mean not getting to finish a 3rd painting.. 

But it was time for bed and my last night at Harrahs.