It’s been a long week! Everyone worked really hard, so today, we just focused on painting after a brief demo. I learned a lot from Peggi, and can highly recommend her. Her next workshop is at the Scottsdale Artist’s School in November. As for these studies, I’m most happy with 2 and 3, and especially … Read more
Today Peggi Kroll-Roberts focused on the structure of the head. If you think of the head as a structure of planes, it becomes easier to paint. Each plane has a relative size, shape and direction. The direction (facing up, down, towards light, away from light) gives you clues about how it should look. For example, … Read more
Day 3: “High Key” Painting Day 3 of the Peggi Kroll-Roberts workshop at l’Atelier aux Couleurs focused on painting “high-key” paintings. This approach to painting is focused on a narrow range of values at the high end (light) of the value scale. I’ve recently experimented with this approach (here, here). I think it’s ironic that … Read more
Peggi taught us a couple more tools for painting. This was an interesting idea: paint a study with as few brushstrokes as possible. You design and then draw a composition that allows you to paint with as few big shapes as possible. This is a great exercise for a couple reasons: first, it’s always a … Read more
Today was the first day of a 5-day Peggi Kroll-Roberts at l’Atelier aux Couleurs in Petaluma. Peggi has a wonderful unique style for painting the figure, so I’ve looked forward to studying with her for some time. She’s also a lot of fun. Today, we started simple: gray scale paintings. These are done, much like … Read more
Concentrated on just one painting today, the last day of North Tahoe Plein Air. While I was looking for a spot, I ran into judge ZeeZee Mott, who was painting on the shore even after just arriving home from Africa the day before! She was in great spirits, and we talked about my relation to … Read more
Another beautiful day in Tahoe! I spent the day in Blackwood Canyon, a favorite spot of mine in the Fall for the turning Aspens. I painted two, but the first I’m not sure about, so I’ll hold for now.
It’s been over a year since I’ve participated in a plein air event, and boy, I feel rusty! The day started with checking in and getting my panels stamped. Ran into lots of old friends! I spent most of the day at DL Bliss State Park, near the Rubicon Trail. This is the deepest, steepest … Read more
I completed another composition from my Avila Beach reference photos last night in my studio. I’d worked on this on/off for a couple weeks. I wanted to include the sky, so I could work on relating the light from the sky to the ground and shadow planes. I also tried to balance rich color with … Read more