What a great weekend! I had the honor to team with Nancy Nowak to teach a workshop in her studio. We had a great group of hardworking artists who all created some wonderful paintings. Nancy and I each started a painting on day one sharing different techniques and then we finished our demos on day two. The artists in the group also started and worked on two paintings. Nancy demonstrated her wonderful watercolor underpainting and I shared my three favorite simple starts.
Here is a photo of my demo painting at the end of the demo time. It was about 95% finished and I was excited to pull it out tomorrow and put in the finishing touches.
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| The painting at the end of the workshop demo time |
I explained to the group while I was painting that I like to use Blair Very Low Odor workable fixative to build up layers of textured pastel. I demonstrated one layer but I knew I would take it home and do a couple more layers of spray and pastel application.
I also explained that I sometimes like to make the spray come out in a splatter! This would be a disaster for some paintings. Not getting a clean light even spray of fixative could ruin a painting. But in the case of this demo I wanted splatter!
Splattering the fixative leaves blobs and dots of fixative. The workable fixative will darken and dull the pastel. It also fixes it in places so the pastel doesn't mix with the next layer. Look at the photo below of my splatter.
They add interest and texture to my dried marsh grasses!
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| The results of splatter spray with workable fixative |
Spray splatter is easy to do. Simple depress the spray button very slowly and press down on one side of the button only. The spray should come out sputtering and spotty! Yay!
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| The pastels I used for the painting |
I will be announcing registration for a couple of workshops in early 2019 in a couple of weeks so stay tuned. I'd love to share with you in person!
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