Carpets of Wildflowers

To celebrate spring, we painted these cozy, atmospheric landscapes featuring a gurgling stream surrounded by colorful hillsides carpeted in wildflowers.

These impressionistic gems were created by artists in our Art Class for Grownups, most of whom having little to no past canvas painting experience.

What is Impressionism? Claude Monet, often considered the first impressionist, described the creation process in this way:

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field... Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you." 

For beginning painters, impressionism can be satisfying and fun because the burden of attempting to paint objects realistically is removed. Instead, we paint our personal impression of what is seen. 

We are simply painting shapes and color and light.

An impressionistic painting can be almost dreamlike or based on a memory of a scene: what do I remember about this special place?  

Perhaps the trees along the horizon, the colors of the flowers, the sky reflected in the water. Simplifying the scene becomes part of the process.

Working on an 11 x 14 black canvas (one layer of black gesso), we started by drawing the basic hill shapes using soft pastel. 

We then painted the sky and the background along the horizon, using small filbert brushes and choppy, bold brush strokes.

We continued downward, starting with the distant flowers and moving forward while depicting more and more detail in the midground and in the foreground. 

We then created the flowing water by randomly painting in our sky colors (again starting at the top and working downward). While still wet, we stroked the paint lightly downward, then across with a dry clean brush for reflections in the water. Then we added some rocks, a few waterlines along the edges, and some white water and splashes. 

Painting these little landscapes helped artists learn to:

Create a scene using one-point perspective.

Depict objects in the distance, midground, and foreground.

Create the impression of a reflective surface and moving water.

Utilize a black canvas and bold brush strokes to make colors stand out.

Select colors that work together effectively.

Utilize resource photography (such as these calendar pictures) to observe shape and form, light and shadows, and color relationships to compose a piece of personal artwork. 

 

For more about Impressionism and painting flowers in this style, please see our previous weblog post: Tuscan Colors Like the Impressionists

Open Studio Artwork

Art classes have been hit-or-miss throughout this winter (travel, illness, life). Subsequently, it was difficult to expect artists to work on the same project each week. So we decided to go with an open-studio format for a while and it worked out quite well.

Find out more about how to create this
wintery painted collage here and here. 

Shown here are a few of our winter-themed art pieces that were created during this time by adult art students in our Thursday Art Class for Grownups. 

This snowy alpine painted collages were painted with tempera on black sulfite paper and collage elements were added. 

The completed artwork was then mounted to a large mat board and embellished with evergreen twigs.

We learned about contemporary illustrator Jen Aranyi and created a few pieces of mixed media art work in her style. (Click here for a complete Jen Aranyi-themed lesson.) 

These were done in our watercolor sketchbooks or on watercolor paper using watercolors with ink. 

Jen's favorite subjects are these jagged mountain scenes, so that's how we got started. 

Then, after getting the hang of it, one student decided to make a greeting card using a completely different subject - in the same style:

We also decided to experiment in watercolor depicting various amounts of snow on evergreen trees.  We attempted in the samples below to start with light snow on one tree and work our way to heavy snow on the last tree.  Try it yourself - watercolorist Susie Short will show you how.

Moonlit Snow

These Moonlit Snow scenes were so much fun to create in the past with our tween and teen artists. So this year my grown up art class gave it a try and guess what? 

They loved it too!

This is a multi-step mixed media project that involves wet-on-wet watercolor, splattered paint, iridescent glitter, paint scraping, silhouettes, wild animals, a three-dimensional element, and a quote!  

What's not to love?

One reason I like this project is because so many art skills are used to create it.  We start with wet-on-wet watercolor for our wintery sky. While it dries we practice creating evergreen trees on a separate sheet of paper and using different brushes. Hint: the fan brush is a favorite. 

We also scrape another sheet of paper with black paint using small pieces of cardboard. These are later cut into strips to create our birch trees for the foreground. 

We paint in a few evergreen trees and the silhouette of a an animal that has been outlined in the midground. We splatter with a bit of white tempera paint and add a punch-out of our moon and a bit of glitter here and there.

Then we place and glue our birch trees over the scene using scraps of recycled packing foam for a 3-D effect. Finally, we add a printed 'snow quote' which we cut out with funky scissors for snowflake-like edges.

Take a look at The Snowy North to see our younger artists' versions of this wintery scene.