Demonstrations

May 20, Janice Kiehl, gourd painting, 1pm art center

Reach out for inspiration and learn something new, how to create beautiful art on Nature's Canvas: a hard shelled gourd. Unlike their fall cousins, the soft shelled ornamental gourds, hard shelled gourds, once dehydrated properly, develop a wood-like outer shell. This...

Judy Rogan, Art and Soul Studio

Join us for our June 17 meeting/ 1pm/ Main Street Bagels for a short meeting and a lively critique of your current art project.  Bring your paintings and your fellow artist will advise how to improve it and tell you what is working well.  This is a really fun event. You don’t want to miss it.

WORKSHOPS

The Grand Junction Brush and Palette Club offers one and two-day workshops throughout the club year. Local artists teach a variety of skills including, composition, technique with varied media. Everyone is welcome. Costs vary. Members receive a discount. Check back often for updates.

May 20, Janice Kiehl, gourd painting, 1pm art center

Reach out for inspiration and learn something new, how to create beautiful art on Nature’s Canvas: a hard shelled gourd. Unlike their fall cousins, the soft shelled ornamental gourds, hard shelled gourds, once dehydrated properly, develop a wood-like outer shell. This surface can be painted, spray painted, dyed with ink dyes, colored with markers and colored pencils, wood burned, and drilled and cut into different shapes with a jigsaw. There are over 30 different varieties/shapes of gourds resulting in many opportunities to create a multitude of beautiful art pieces such as vases and bowls.

Paint/Draw at Michaels

The Brush and Palette Club has reserved the classroom at Michaels every Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, Michaels has closed their classroom until further notice to help stop the spread of covid 19.

Terrie Lombardi Workshop Notes

What does a judge look for in a painting?

  • “Composition” – stay out of the center
  • “Shapes” – shapes are unique and different
  • “Lines”  – lead you through a painting
  • “Edges”  – hard to soft; soft edges around the outside and harder in the interior and at the focal point
  • “Color”  – one color dominates, use an analogous color wheel
  • “Values”  – light to dark, enhance the focal point
  • “Texture”  – use tools in a variety of expressive ways to create texture

Order of a painting

  • Stay out of the center – mark the center of your canvas and the center of each edge as a reminder
  • What shapes – big to small
  • Values – light to dark
  • Colors – what is your mother or dominate color that you can satellite out from

Art is a process

“Drawing is a skill that must be learned . . .”

Richard SchmidI found the following quote on drawing by Richard Schmid in his book “Alla Prima.”

“There is a popular notion that artists are born with an ability to draw, but that isn’t true.  The impulse to draw is there, but no one arrives in this world endowed with the capacity to graphically depict reality.  I have never known a painter who was just naturally good at it and could do it without serious training.  Drawing is a skill that must be learned, but it isn’t like swimming or riding a bike.  Once you get the knack of it, you can’t relax and just let it happen by itself.  It takes constant practice and presence of mind.  Why?  Because it is not a physical skill; it is a mental discipline.  It deals with continual variables rather than the repitition of memorized shapes.  I always have the fond hope that someday it will get easier, but it never does.  Sound drawing always demands great care right down to the last dab of paint.

“For most of us “drawing” brings to mind an outline of something.  This deeply ingrained assumption originates in childhood when we learned to use lines to make pictures.  Yet in real life there are no lines around things.  Line drawing is only a representation or diagram of our visual world.  Painting, on the other hand (the kind I am dealing with here) attempts to create an illusion of that world.  Consequently, when I use the word “drawing,” I mean the size, shape and arrangement of all the patches of colors that collectively make things look the way they do (and which also constitutes a painting).  When you render those patches their right size, the right shape, and with their distinctive edges and color, your painting will look like your subject.  If you don’t, it won’t.  It will look different.”

“Drawing is simply measuring. As it applies to direct painting from life, drawing comes down to nothing more than figuring out the width and height of color shapes and then fitting them together.  Still, drawing remains difficult for nearly everyone, which is odd when you think about it because drawing is the only visual element we work with that seems to deal with a measurable and definable aspect of the visual world.  The other three elements:  color, value and edges, are relative qualities with generous room for interpretation.  Drawing is about specific dimensions.”