New Video Demo on Uart Dark Paper!

'Autumn Grace'            9x12         pastel        ©Karen Margulis
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I've been doing some house painting on the weekends. It hasn't left me with time to do a Sunday Studio Live demo. This week we made time! I decided to do my demo painting on the new Uart Dark paper since I have been playing with it all week. It was perfect for an autumn landscape!  The painting went through a transformation after the demo and I will share the finish in this post. You can see the entire demo on my Youtube channel. Here is the link:

Watch the video here

The planning board

Demos are interesting. I am trying to talk about what I am thinking. Sometimes I can't keep up with myself! And sometimes a painting needs me to step back and look at it....something I don't do during a demo especially one being filmed!  So as promised I took some time to evaluate the painting and made some changes. Below I will explain what I did to finish.

The demo where I left it at the end of the video

• The painting had potential but on review I felt that it had too much going on. The bright yellow tree competed with the busy foreground patches and grasses. Sometimes it isn't what you put in but what you take away! So I simplified the foreground with some big bold strokes and a little workable fixative.

Simplified foreground

• I needed to find a way to lead the viewer through the grass and shrubs to the big yellow tree. I had another photo of this location that showed a creek. That's what I wanted! A simple ribbon of blue water as a leading line. I put in some blue strokes and continued to add grass and shrubs forcing myself to keep it simple.
• I refined the trees with some brighter yellows and a few linear marks for tree trunks. Finished!

That was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed the video and the finish. Perhaps you would like to try a similar landscape?  I have exciting news coming tomorrow. Here is a sneak peak.....I have a new page on patreon.com which will allow me to share more in depth instruction, videos, handouts and more. Check it out at www.patreon.com/karenmargulis . I will be adding a step by step demo and much more to this page.