The Jen Evenhus pastel workshop with the Austin Pastel Society

"Gerber Gala" pastel by Jen Evenhus

Jen Evenhus' workshop is called The Beauty of Imperfection. What a great workshop this was! We got to watch Jen create this most awesome floral painting, that she must have really loved herself because she put it right up on her website home page!

As far as workshops go, I must say that this was one of the more challenging workshops I've taken. That's a good thing! In my experience, the more difficult they are, the more I learn. Frustration in effort is productive in the long run. I mean, no-one but Jen Evenhus can paint like Jen Evenhus! Trying to brings on frustration, but in the trying are also included valuable things like discovery and exploration. Artwork cannot improve without occasionally moving into the unknown.

Jen is an excellent teacher. She has a well-organized and very fast-paced workshop, with lots of timed exercises on color theory and technique, and she has really good handouts! I learned a lot and have one half-way decent landscape to show for it (See "Orchard" on my Daily Paintings Blog!) which was started in the last hour of the workshop and finished at home.

Me, I'm more of a visual learner, so I took lots of pics. Here's her opening demo on Saturday morning:

photo and thumbnail sketch

 She chooses her pastels in advance.

Her drawing with charcoal.

I found it absolutely amazing how she can get such a dynamic, intriguing, colorful composition from such a, well, really sort of mostly ....boring photo! I've got thousands of photos in my files that are equally as interesting. This was really inspiring!


And, her Sunday daisy demo "Gerber Gala", I gave the pics to my son and he obligingly put together this short slideshow vid:

Thanks for watching! Enjoy more of Jen's work and find out about her workshops at jenevenhus.com.

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Barbara Jaenicke demo

This weekend I'm fortunate to be taking a workshop from artist Barbara Jaenicke, at the Coppini Academy of Art in San Antonio. I absolutely LOVE her landscapes! Click on her name to visit her website!
She first does a thumbnail sketch from her photo, to nail down the basic value patterns, then does an underpainting with pastel washed in with isopropyl alcohol.

These are just a very few of the photos that I took. but she worked so sparingly that most of the pics I took didn't seem to show much progress, but somehow, magically, the painting got finished!

These are the colors she used for the underpainting...

She washed in the underpainting with  isopropyl alcohol.

She tested what colors she would likely use in the painting, and then got right to it!

My painting for today was from a photo taken at my home town Landa Park, and it looks pretty good in my camera, and others in the workshop liked it, but I don't feel like it's done so I'm not going to show it yet. Maybe tomorrow.

3 Marla Baggetta Workshop Demos at IAPS 2015

Sunday June 7, the final day of the IAPS pastel convention, I had Marla Baggetta's one-day workshop. I had seen a painting of her's at the 2011 IAPS pastel exhibit and wanted to learn from her ever since! Marla is well known for her series of 100 variations of the same landscape (done on a dare, she says!)  Well, what an incredible learning tool that is! In her workshop she demoed another landscape done with three different preparations. The first one was direct on a solid ground (paper). The other two had quite different underpaintings.

 She starts her paintings with simple thumbnail breakdowns of the basic shapes and values. Then chooses the size and shape she wants for the scene. (These thumbnails were for a different painting, but you get the idea..)

Demo #1 (on Art Spectrum Colorfix paper I think..)

 This second demo had a "notan" underpainting of graphite washed in with alcohol.

Demo #2

 Demo #3 started with a vivid watercolor underpainting. (#2 and #3 are on Wallis Professional paper - yes, the old good stuff! Marla very graciously had some sheets that she offered to the workshop students for their paintings that day if they wished..)

Demo #3

It was amazing to see how very different the three paintings came out. But she was using the same reference photo for all three!

Here are some of her handy teaching tools; color scheme charts and tiny sample landscapes painted only with the colors shown on the swatches...

Lastly, a glimpse of the back table and some of the paintings she had for sale!

I bought one of her smaller paintings. This one's about 9x5 inches. Dreamy!