Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Workshop with Lara Call Gastinger

This past weekend I took the workshop with Lara Call Gastinger and 11 other students at a delightful bed and breakfast near Charlottesville. We all worked from actual bits of trees, bushes, berries, leaves, etc. I chose to draw the seed pods from a redbud tree which I have always found fascinating. We drew on tracing paper then transferred the drawing to the watercolor paper. This gave us a clean line with no erasures which disturb the surface of the paper. The paper itself was new for me as I am accustomed to using coldpress paper. I found I really liked the hotpress. I was able to get cleaner lines and the color blending was smoother. It was ironic that I've been trying to get away from being so exact and putting in every detail and here I was doing just that again. But I really enjoyed it. The only problem with the weekend was we were stuck inside and it was a gorgeous couple of days. I would much preferred to have been working outside. I did get to take a walk each day so that helped.

Hope you enjoy these. I still have a little work to do on the poppies but thought I'd put them here anyway.

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