My first workshop

 
 
 
 
Friday and Saturday I conducted my very first art workshop. I was pretty nervous but my students were so friendly and nice that I was soon at ease. I tried to teach them how I use photos and mostly how to work out a plan before you ever start to paint. I am now thinking that a workshop about just getting ready to paint would be helpful to many artists. So many times we are inspired and excited to start a painting, but if we don't think the design principles through--we often come up short on what we had invisioned.
I did the still life painting on the first day and the little landscape the second day. I will work on these some more but wanted to show what can be done in just an hour if you take the time to do a good drawing of what you want to paint first. In the photo of the class--you can see that they have masked off the section of the photo they are going to paint, and they have done a drawing of that area, working out the design problems (moving a tree, reshaping a mountain, raising a horizon for example), then they are blocking on that drawing getting everything in the right place before they ever begin to paint. Nothing is worse that painting a beautiful barn and then wishing you could move it over a little! Had to include that pic of baby Emily who was the best behaved of the whole group!