Jennifer McChristian Workshop - Continued

Although the first day of the Scottsdale workshop was inside due to rain and cold, the rest of the week was outside at beautiful locations around the area. The weather was just fabulous and so nice to enjoy the sunshine while painting. This demo above of Jennifer's was at the Papago Park location, where we painted for two days. So many great things to paint there! In addition to painting, I took TONS of reference photos that will no doubt make it into my paintings in the future.

Below I included my painting of the second day of the workshop. It is another study which I included the reference photo, value study, and the color study. Again, these are VERY SMALL, about 4" x 5.5", so the aim was to capture the big shapes and simplify them. It takes lots of practice to weed out the many details of a scene and only concentrate on big shapes and the major value areas. One of the ladies in the workshop who was accustomed to painting on very large canvases kept saying she felt like she was painting on postcards! However, it was a good way to keep the shapes simple and really concentrate on values. When I finally did a painting on an 8x10 canvas later in the week, I felt like I was painting on a giant canvas! These exercises were a great learning experience for me and something I will do again and again to develop the skills of painting that I would like to in my own painting experiences.

(Click on image to see enlarged)