WAY Out of My Comfort Zone

Posted by Maggie

I love flowers. In the summer, I have containers and hanging baskets of flowers all over the patio, and there are rosebushes and hollyhocks, wisteria and trumpet vines. I take pictures of flowers when traveling, and never miss a chance to visit a botanic garden.

But I almost never paint them, at least not up close. I've done a few pastel paintings where flowers were incorporated, but I've never painted a vase of flowers. Until now.

One of the other instructors who teaches at the New Mexico Art League, Cynthia Rowland, paints wonderful flowers (and portraits, but I'm not going there yet!) in oils. Yesterday, she gave me a long lesson. I spent the day working on my painting, and could hardly sleep last night because I was eager to get back to it. Of course, since I had to wait for the sun to shine again, as I was using only natural light, it was pretty silly to lie awake thinking about it. But I was excited about the first day's work and looking forward to the next.

While painting in oils is not unfamiliar, changing both the subject and the medium was a push. It was just what I wanted, though, in order to break out of my normal patterns of painting.

Painting flowers from life had its challenges—when I went back to the studio this morning, one of the sunflowers had wilted and could not be coaxed back into position, so I had to revise the composition. I'm used to revising compositions in pastel, and was pleasantly surprised that I could make major changes in oil almost as easily. Next time, I'll remember to take a photo of my set-up in case I have a similar problem.

It's not perfect—I see quite a few things I'd like to change or would do differently if I started over—but in general, I'm very happy with my first attempt at a painting of flowers in oils. I can hardly wait until I can go buy more flowers and try another arrangement.

Sunflowers in Blue Vase, 14x11, oil, ©Maggie Price.

Painting Summer in Winter

Posted by Maggie

It's been cold here in New Mexico, though lacking in snow or rain. Still, one day I decided to warm up a little by painting from a photograph I took in Colorado last summer.

I decided to do something experimental, using the Pastelmat surface. I like this surface, though I'm still getting used to it. I began with a block-in, using only the sides of my pastels, and using very soft pastels throughout.  While I often exaggerate or change colors for an underpainting, in this case I stayed fairly close to the local colors, going a bit darker in some areas than what I intended for the final.

Then I washed over each area of color with alcohol. (In this case, I used ordinary rubbing alcohol. Denatured alcohol is a different thing, and I'll write about that later.)

Moving towards realistic color, I developed the painting, still using only the sides of the pastels, and working until I had covered every part of the painting surface with fresh pastel.


My goal for this painting was to keep it loose and lively, so I tried very hard to limit how much detail I added. It was difficult to define the edges of the trees without going to small strokes, but I continued to use fat soft pastels, hoping that would keep me from getting too detailed.

When I got to this point (above right), I wasn't happy with it. So I took the alcohol and brush and washed the whole thing again. I was careful to keep my colors clean and separate, starting with the lighter values and moving towards the dark at the end. The wash softened edges and mingled color (in spite of my best efforts to keep the colors separated). I liked it better, but felt it needed a fresh layer of pastel to liven it up and remove the muddiness created by the second wash of alcohol. (Left, the painting after the second alcohol wash.)


In the end, I still felt it could be looser, but I liked it. I think it was interesting to use a second wash halfway through the painting, and I may do that again with other paintings in the future.

The final painting, below: Summer Solstice, 12x12, pastel, ©Maggie Price.

Finding Time to Paint

Posted by Maggie

It's embarrassing to start every blog with the admission that it's been too long since I blogged last. So I'm going to skip that and move on.

Since I posted last, we have been away from home more than we've been home. We taught workshops in Scotland (with an extra week there for a vacation, which is pretty rare, since most of our travel involves teaching), in Arkansas, in Spain, in New York City, and in Georgia. We spent Thanksgiving with family in Massachusetts. There were some occasions when we had as few as three days home between trips. It was crazy, hectic, and mostly fun.

Scotland is one of our favorite places in the world. Painting there is wonderful; there are so many subjects everywhere you look. For this workshop we were on the eastern coast, and I fell in love with the harbors and fishing villages. My favorites were Crail and Pittenweem. As always in Scotland, painting outdoors is a challenge. It's often wet, usually cold, and then there are all the usual problems of plein air painting. But it remains one of the places I love most, and love painting.  At left, my partially-completed field study of the harbor at Pittenweem.

At our Georgia workshop, I did one of the demonstrations in oil. As readers of this blog know, I've recently returned to painting in oils, though pastel remains my primary medium.

I chose for my subject one of my favorite spots in Scotland, the village of St. Abbs. Bill and I spent a couple of days there before heading to Anstruther for the workshop. It's a place I hope to return to again and again. I have dozens of photos from this wonderful village and from along the seacoast on the walk we took to St. Abbs Head, and hope to paint many of them, soon!  
Above, St. Abbs Afternoon, 11x14, oil on canvas, ©Maggie Price.

After a whirlwind of activity, we arrived in Spain in October for the workshop there. We've held five previous workshops in the tiny village of Juzcar, which until just a few months ago was an unspoiled, undiscovered white village in the Genal Valley of Andalucia. Shortly before we arrived in 2011, though, Sony Pictures chose Juzcar as the "home of the Smurfs" to promote the smurf movie. With the agreement of the village, they painted the entire village, every single white structure, smurf blue. The village was overrun with overexcited children most days, and we took more day trips to quieter, white villages, to paint. The village was scheduled to be repainted white, but as of this posting, the villagers have voted to remain blue. So in 2012, instead of going to Spain once more, we're offering a workshop in Italy in October. If you'd like to join us, I believe I can promise a smurf-free zone.

I'd like to close by promising to post more often, but the reality is I'm on deadline for my third art instruction book, so who knows how the next couple of months will go. I thank you for reading, though, and wish everyone a wonderful 2012.

Time Is Flying, Must Be Having Fun

Posted by Maggie

I was amazed to notice how long it has been since I posted the last blog. Time has flown by faster than ever this year.

I spent much of the spring getting ready for the IAPS convention. This is such a wonderful event, and the 2011 convention was bigger and better than ever, with more instructors, classes, workshops, and of course, attendees. It occupied most of my waking hours for months and then —poof! It was over. It reminded me of Thanksgiving dinner. You know, you shop and plan and cook for days, and then everyone descends upon the table and suddenly it's all gone!

But it's fun looking back at the convention, and I just posted some great photos on the IAPS web site. Check them out.

After recovering from the convention, I taught a workshop in Santa Fe in July, and then at the end of the month, Bill and I both participated in a plein air paint-out in Ouray, Colorado. The "Paint Out on Main Street" is part of their annual Artist's Alpine Holiday. We chose a painting location just off Main, on the bridge over the river, each of us looking in a different direction. We had fun with the 90-minute painting session, and then to my surprise, my painting received the first place award!

Left, Uncompahgre River Bank, 9x12, ©Maggie Price 2011.
Below left, Untitled, 8x10, ©Bill Canright 2011.

We spent a couple of days in Ouray after the paint-out so that I could do demonstrations for the art association, and we enjoyed the high mountains and the village.

Now I'm working on my teaching schedule for 2012. I'm excited to announce several great workshops are lined up already—in New York City, Oregon, Florida, and France. Details about all these are on my web site, and more will be added later, so check back now and then.

And yes, we are having fun!

Class Demo: Animas River painting

Posted by Maggie

Yesterday was the first day of a six-week Saturday class that I'm teaching at the New Mexico Art League in Albuquerque. In my classes and workshops, I focus on one technique or subject each day. I like to start the session with my favorite (and easiest) underpainting technique, which is to block in the subject loosely and then wash it with Turpenoid. Depending on the subject, I may exaggerate or change the colors, and I often use slightly darker values for the middle- and darkest-value areas, knowing I can lighten them on the next pass of color.

There are many benefits of underpainting, and I begin over half of my pastel paintings with one of the underpainting techniques. In this painting, the underpainting stage allowed me to solidify the compositional changes I was making from my photo reference, and to lay in a good foundation of values and temperature along with hue. Because this was a class demonstration, I was focused on explaining what I was doing as I worked, and forgot to photograph the progression as frequently as I might have if I had been in the studio. The first photo shows the painting after the underpainting was turped and dried, and after I went back in to do some re-drawing with my soft vine charcoal. At this stage, I was pleased with the composition, initial value structure, and the relationship of warm and cool from the background to the foreground water. However, I could see that I would need to make some changes in the colors and temperatures of the rock formations in order to make them read correctly as to position in background or foreground.

As the painting progressed, I concentrated on establishing local color throughout, and on painting the water with its churning wave action in the middle-ground, and the two fall formations. I didn't worry about the background rocks and foliage in this stage, as I knew I would want to imply more than state their forms in order to make them recede. As I painted the foreground water, I worked on the dark and middle values, avoiding any highlights or light values in this middle stage. When I paint moving water, I like to try to feel the movement of the water with my hand, so as to describe the motion more clearly. In the foreground, the warm color of the water is influenced by the color of the reddish rocks beneath the surface, while the deeper churning water in the middle ground is more clearly the silty-gray-green color of the water. Shadows of objects on the land mass in the top left affect the color as well.

In the final stages, I directed my attention to the focal point rocks. As I developed them, I realized that the bluish cast of color on the rock in front of the focal-point rock needed to relate to it more in color and temperature, and the rocks on the right also needed color and temperature adjustments. The dark shadowed crack on the second rock on the right bothered me, so I muted it to help that rock sit behind the other. Once I had the foreground and middle ground well established, I loosely blocked in and adjusted the background, keeping it muted to recede. Finally, I worked over the entire painting, adjusting edges and values. Above left, Animas River, 16x20 pastel, ©Maggie Price (on white Richeson Premium Pastel Surface, applies to gatorfoam).

Now that I am back home, the painting is sitting in my studio where I can glance at it now and then, and watch for flaws or problems that catch my eye. I'll leave it there for a week or two before I decide that it's truly finished. I've already spotted a couple of adjustments I need to make to the water in the foreground, so I'm definitely not pronouncing it done yet!

Class demos don't always turn into paintings worth finishing or keeping—after all, the purpose of a demo is to demonstrate techniques and give information to my students, not necessarily to complete a painting. I'm very pleased with this one as a demo, though, and I think with a little careful attention, it will be worth being framed.

If you're interested in learning more about underpainting techniques, check out my two new DVDs, each of which deals with a different approach to underpainting.

Old & New Technology: Color Charts on the iPhone

Posted by Maggie

As followers of this blog may recall, while I'm primarily a pastel artist, I have been working in oils again, off and on, for a couple of years. I'm quite enjoying them, and feel I'm making progress in becoming reacquainted with the medium after years away from it.

I'm going to be working with a limited palette while away on a plein air painting trip in the near future. To refresh my memory, and clarify my understanding of how these selected colors interact, I spent some time making color charts. It's a tedious, but pleasurable, task, and I always enjoy seeing the surprises when two colors combine to make a new color that's not quite what I expected.

Once this task was done, I began thinking about how to use them. I'd like them close at hand when I'm painting outdoors, but at the same time, I want to keep my set-up as small and lightweight as possible. And I had a momentary vision of trying to flip through the color chart with one hand while mixing colors with the other, no doubt in a high wind.

I needed some way to make the charts smaller and easier to access. (Click! Light bulb overhead!)  I decided to see if they'd work on my iPhone.

Yesterday, I tested the idea. I photographed one chart, resized the image in Photoshop, and then loaded it onto the phone. Amazingly, it worked quite well. The colors are pretty accurate (okay, not 100%, but certainly in the 90s), and when I enlarged the images on the screen of the iPhone, I could even see the grain of the canvas.

Today, I set up better lighting and photographed all the charts. It took about half an hour to photograph them, download to the computer, resize them, and then load them onto the iPhone. They look great! I can flip through them easily, find the color I am looking for, and enlarge to see the handwritten notes as to the colors used.

I still might put the originals in my bag, but I bet I won't use them.

Workshops Past and Future

Posted by Maggie

Bill and I have just spent some time going through photos of our previous trips to Scotland and Spain to share with people who might be interested in joining us in one of our upcoming workshops.

Foreign workshops are different than ones at home for many reasons beyond the obvious travel to another country. They are a delightful combination of sightseeing and painting instruction, learning the light and lay of the land we're visiting, and enjoying the company of other artists for days on end. The pace of painting is more relaxed than in our indoor U.S. workshops, as we combine painting with sketching photography, and just experiencing where we are.

I love both these locations, Scotland and Spain. We've been to one or both countries to teach workshops almost every year for quite a few years, and yet we're eager to return. For a quick preview of the workshop experience, or just a vicarious visit, read on:

Memories of Scotland

Here are some photos from previous trips and workshops. Some of the fishing villages and coastal scenes are near or among the places we'll go in 2011. We have the minimum number of people needed to confirm this workshop will go forward, but there's still room for more.



Scotland workshop: Anstruther, Kingdom of Fife, August 27-September 7, 2011

We'll base at the Craw's Nest Hotel in Anstruther, one of the beautiful Royal Burghs in the East Neuk of fife. From there, we'll explore the beautiful rugged scenery of the Fife coastline. We'll paint on the grounds and in the gardens of Kellie Castle, in the villages of Pittenweem and Crail, and in the Botanical Gardens at St. Andrews. For a full itinerary, download the pdf brochure. An added bonus: this workshop is sponsored by Jack Richeson & Co., and all your supplies (including pastels, surfaces, easel, carrying bag—everything you could need down to baby wipes and paper towels) are shipped to the hotel for you and back to your home afterwards.


Highlights from Spain

We've taught five workshops based in the tiny village of Juzcar (pronounced Hooth-car), Spain. The village is in the Genal Valley, nestled in the mountains of Andalucia in southern Spain. The hotel is charmingly rustic in appearance but modern in comfort and convenience, and our Cordon-Bleu chef amazes us daily with the wonderful meals. Last year Bill and I visited Sevilla prior to our workshop, to determine if it was a good location to add as a day trip (it was!), and were enchanted by the town and particularly the buildings and garden of the Alcazar Palace, home to the King of Spain. We included photos of Sevilla in this collection from previous years:



Spain workshop: Juzcar, Malaga Province, Spain, October 8-17, 2011

We'll return once more to Hotel Bandolero in Juzcar, one of the pueblos blancos of the Genal Valley. We'll visit other villages in the valley, and take trips as well to Ronda, to paint the famous bridge from a perfect vantage point below, and to explore the town as well. A day in Sevilla, as well as day trips to Zahara and Olvera, both outside the valley, will round out the experience. And let's not forget the flamenco! An evening performance will give the painters dozens of photographs for future paintings. While this hotel is very small and the group size is limited, we still have room for a few more. Download the pdf flyer for complete information.

Spain or Scotland? We are so lucky, we get to go to both places, and I'm sure we'll enjoy the company of some great artists and make new friends in both workshops.