Dropping in on Kitty Wallis' workshop

Kitty graciously allowed me to drop in on her workshop today. where I got to paint a value painting where I artificially created a palette with warm colors in the light to midtones and cool colors for the midtone to dark values. The trees painting on the bottom is the resulting painting from that exercise.

In the afternoon, I painted the salt marsh painting.

In addition to great instruction, the workshop has a group of excellent people participating in it. Tomorrow we'll make pastels!

Kitty Wallis Advanced Color Intensive Day Two

Mixed temperature value palette

Warm lights and mids, cool mids and darks

Class renderings with warm lights, cool darks

After yesterday's experiments with value palette, today Kitty had us work with temperature. Color temperature is important to understand for any serious painter, but it's seldom discussed in workshops.

First we selected playful palettes but limited the light to midtones to warm colors and the midtones to darks were cool. This sounds easier than it was. Even steps of value between each color change. I discovered some holes in my available pastels.

Using only those colors selected for the palette described above, we rendered another black and white photo to a color painting. Some artists used the same photo reference from yesterday, but I selected a new one.

Finally, we used the palette from yesterday and the new one from today, mixed them together and repeated the exercise. This time we were able to select warm or cool colors. I used the same photo reference so that I could compare the two experiences.

Contrast between dark and light, warm and cool, bright and dull all go toward giving the painter a variety of ways to express his/her ideas about the essence of the subject. Today felt like starting to learn how to play an unfamiliar piece of music. I played a few wrong notes, felt awkward at times, but I'm excited about what is to come!

Workshop Day Two

Today we started by creating our own value palette. The object is to have a playful group of colors that are even steps from light to dark on a value scale. This is so much easier to do with grays!

One the left you see my process. First start with five broad value fields and then test colors on top of those fields to determine if they are lighter or darker.

Are you eyes crossing yet?

On the far right you see my final value palette.