Fealing Lin Workshop-Days 2, 3,and 4

This week took forever to get here, and now it is almost over.  This has been an intense week of learning about composition, style, and brushwork.  Fealing is a great teacher and a very nice person. Our class is relaxed and very friendly.  Each day Fealing teaches a lesson in some element of art, and does a painting demo.  She does not mind us taking photos while she is teaching.

We also do some critique of student work each day.  I learn as much from looking at other student work as from trying it on my own.

It has been very humbling to see the amazing work done by my classmates!  There is a high-quality camera that projects the artwork and the reference photo onto a large whiteboard. I really liked this one of a girl who is a professional model.

I have learned my lesson about having a good photo to work from.  It should be taken with no flash, either outside in the sun or with a single light source.  You need some good shadows on the face.

Every day we find a new surprise from Cheap Joe's Art Stuff at our workstations.  We have gotten towels for dabbing our paintbrushes, some Kilimanjaro watercolor paper samples, and some watercolor board.  Joe himself came in today and spoke to each of us.  Yesterday I ate lunch with his granddaughter, Megan, who works in the marketing department.  I am so impressed by the staff at this place of business.

Even though I have to drive 48 minutes each way to get to Boone,  almost the whole drive is on a scenic mountain byway.  The weather sometimes starts out golden, changes to threatening skies, maybe a little rain, and then back to beautiful skies.  I love it when the sun moves in golden shifts across the dark mountains.

I have almost finished two portraits.  I think they are okay, but I want to practice a lot more to get my paintings to the quality that I want.

Here is Lily. with a darker background.  Still has a lot of color!

Here is a smaller painting of my great-niece Holly when she was a baby.  She was wearing my straw sun hat and sitting on the table while I was eating lunch.  The sun light was pouring through the hat and reflecting on her head.

Today Fealing taught us about making loose paintings with groups of people forming interesting shapes.  You do these very quickly, with very few brushstrokes.  Here are two that I tried using her reference photos.

Now that it's dry, I think the first one needs some more darks for more contrast.

The next one looks almost tropical.

One more day tomorrow, a short day where we wrap up our projects and do a final critique.

Fealing Lin Workshop Day 1

This morning it was "up and at-em" very early.  I had a beautiful drive to Boone in the frosty air, with mist rising up from the New River and setttling in the valleys.  When I got there (in 48 minutes) there were two men from Cheap Joe's waiting in the parking lot to help carry our workshop supplies.  I loved that idea...wish it could happen at a quilt workshop when you are toting sewing machines, tools, fabric, rulers, irons, and what-have-you!

Each student gets their own worktable with their own trashcan.  We were each gifted with a Cheap Joe's water bucket, 

pencil, and a free copy of Palette Magazine.

Fealing Lin is a soft-spoken, gentle person with a sense of humor and tons of talent.  We each had to bring our own enlarged drawing of a face on a sheet of watercolor paper.  She helped us each (26 people) with our drawings.  Then she did a demo of the first layer of watercolor washes.  These just blend and drip on the paper with no worrying about shapes or features.

I decided to use the same drawing of my granddaughter Lily's face that I had used previously for a more traditional portrait.  I liked the rainbow of colors.

After that dried, Fealing showed how to start building up the layers of color.  By now my Lily is looking a little like Children of the Corn with no eye color!

By the third layer, the planes of the face are added and some of the features are beginning to be worked.  At this point I did not like my portrait, as the poor girl looked like she had two Wooly Worm caterpillars for eyebrows and maybe two black eyes!  I was getting tired, so I left soon after 4:00. 

There is a Bernina shop just across the highway that I spied when I left.  I went in and selected some red fabrics to start making the quilt top from my gifted red and white sampler blocks.

Then I met two of my brothers and their wives for dinner at Pepper's in Boone.  That was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed catching up with them.  It felt kind of funny to go there because it is right next to where my father lived in Boone, and we often ate lunch there with him.  Miss you, Dad!

I came back to our cabin with an aching back but looking forward to tomorrow's lesson.

A Gift of Watercolor

Last summer, my son Bryson got married on the deck of the cottage that we have rented every summer for more than twenty years at Sunset Beach, North Carolina.

The owners keep a guest book which I write in at the end of our beach week.  Of course I mentioned the family wedding at the cottage.

The owners' daughter, Brenda Butka, is an artist whose work is represented at  the Sunset River Marketplace in Calabash, NC.  Apparently she went to the beach cottage in November and read the journal.  Sometime around Thanksgiving I received a package from her in the mail.  It was a watercolor painting of the view from the deck!  It faces the marsh and Bird Island.  I had the picture framed and gave it to Bryson and Melissa for Christmas.

Wasn't that a lovely surprise!  I had a hard time giving this away.

Speaking of gifts of art, Charlie hung his two Christmas presents from me behind his desk at work, along with last year's watercolor.

I have done two more paintings in the past week.  Both are from lessons in a book by my teacher from Art of the Carolinas, Tom Jones.

The first one represents a scene by a mountain lake.

I altered the subject of the second one, which in the lesson had a group of buffalo gathered by a lake.  I did not want to paint buffalo, so I painted in a monster buck instead.

I am having a lot of fun with watercolor painting.  I signed up for a portrait class at Cheap Joe's in Boone with portrait artist Fealing Lin in October.  I  had seen an article about her technique in Watercolor Artist magazine, and fell in love with her loose, translucent portraits such as this one.

Isn't it beautiful?  And October in the North Carolina mountains for a whole week is not too bad, either.  I can stay at our cabin in Laurel Springs and commute back and forth for the classes.

I also looked into local art classes, and saw that the watercolor class that was canceled last year at the Wake Forest Parks and Recreation is being offered again.  So I signed up for it and also a drawing class with Mary Benejam O'Connell.  These will run from February to May on Wednesday afternoons.

When I was registering for the Wake Forest classes, I got re-acquainted with a former school guidance counselor that I had worked with earlier in my teaching career.  She is also a quilter, and invited me to come and speak about art quilts at the Wake Forest Friends quilt bee.  I think I have enough projects that are not packed up that I can bring for show-and-tell.  The Pamela Allen workshop projects alone take up a large Rubbermaid container!  Speaking of which, I am almost finished stitching one of them from several years ago, and it will be ready for machine-quilting soon.

A Pesty Kind of Day

Yesterday, I was picturing myself sitting idly by, perhaps coloring one of my trapunto quilts or stitching, while a team of workers installed the new porcelain tile floor in my kitchen. I had worked like a dog last week to empty out the kitchen, right down to the shelves in the pantry.

No dice- no tile! When they went to pull my order, they found that the tile did not have the same dye lot numbers. I understand this problem very well, being a fabric and fiber freak, but it did not make me very happy. It may be another week before they have tile with matching dye lots. Meantime, the cupboard is bare. Ever been so mad that one look could peel wallpaper?

Well, I was not that mad. But I did start peeling off the kitchen wallpaper. I had not planned to do that before the floors were installed, but I washed the walls last week. The wallpaper was looking really dingy and when I took down the pictures and quilts, you could see fading. And the paper started peeling off.

DH's solution was to put up bigger pictures.

I started peeling the wallpaper off. The vinyl part comes off easily in one big sheet.

The glue and paper backing was a different story. A combination of Murphy's Oil Soap solution, Downy Fabric Softener sprayed on, and my Scunci Steamer has been getting it off, but not without a lot of muscle.

While I was on a ladder overlooking one of the windows to the back yard, look what was looking back at me!

Now, I do not like snakes. I am a wildlife lover, but that does not extend to snakes, especially when they are approaching my back steps...or under my bird feeder!

I went to put on my tennis shoes in the garage, and a five-lined skink jumped out of my shoe. These skinks tend to inhabit my garage, and I really don't mind them at all. I often see them scurrying around in there. They only bother me when they jump out at me in a snake-like manner, especially when I have just seen a snake!

As I approached the snake, he straightened out and slithered under my deck, home of the riding lawn mower and other junk that I was not about to enter in search of the snake.

Went back in...a big black spider was on MY kitchen chair.

I finally realized that all the recent rain from Hanna has probably brought a lot of these pests in search of dry ground. Or maybe the spider was lurking in a corner of the kitchen ceiling.

Anyway, I finished peeling all the paper off the walls except for the area behind the cabinets.

Here is something more fun to show you: I spent my entire fee from doing the blue and green quilt last week on a new toy: a set of 84 Neocolor II watercolor crayons.

I have been admiring Fannie Narte's beautiful work with these, and really wanted them. I got them at a good price from Cheap Joe's, a wonderful art supply source.

Actually, instead of ordering them, I could have driven up to Boone to get them last weekend. Joe Miller began his business in a drugstore there...read his interesting bio on the website.

Last weekend in the mountains, I was planning to do a scientific study a la my blog friend Vicki Welsh of Field Trips in Fiber. I made a gradient of each color, from intense to light. My plan was to number each color, and divide in half, applying water with a brush over half to see the difference. That has not happened yet.

Better go and finish my peeling project!