Jennifer McChristian Workshop - Last Post

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Well, this is the last post for my workshop that I will do. I hope you have gotten something out of them! I really like reading reviews and information about workshops that I sign up for before I sign up for them on other people's sites and blogs. It usually is a tool in helping me decide if I am ready at that particular point in my journey for that instructor, or if I will benefit from that particular type of instruction or painting. That is why I have spent the last few posts in showing a bit of what I did at this workshop so if you ever have a chance to take one from Jennifer, you will see kind of what to expect. 

This is another study I did on the fourth day of the workshop. As you can see, I forgot to take the reference photo when I started my sketch and the light had already changed by the time I got out my camera! If you paint outside at all in the sunlight, you know just how this is! I quickly got my sketch down with my values (did a thumbnail sketch with markers in my sketchbook instead of the painted value study) so it didn't matter to me if the light changed or not. I was going with what I first sketched out in my thumbnail sketch. As you can also see, I used that "artistic license" again to change a few things about the composition. Left out an umbrella, the car in the background, and just included less detail than I saw in the actual view. I really tried to concentrate on the values and getting the right colors for the values I had drawn off in my thumbnail sketch. And again, not a finished painting, but something I may decide to use as a study for a larger studio painting in the future. I now have enough information to do that with my thumbnail sketch, color study, and the photo I took while there!

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.

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