A workshop Nationally-recognized watercolor artist, Kathy Durdin.
Open to members and open to the public
Food: Coffee and pastries – Lunch catered – Soft drinks
Costs: $75 each / $60 LAG members
Use the on-line registration and payment. There is only room for 20 participants. So don’t delay because this workshop will fill quickly!
Visit the Lakeland Art Guild website for more information on the workshop.
About the Workshop
Do you find yourself picking up those small brushes too soon? Do you wish you could see more and different colors in your images? Do some colors scare you? Do you always intend to lose some edges but then find your finished paintings very tight?
In this class series, you will work on expanding your color palette and then applying what you learned to working from photographs.
A good drawing is the critical foundation to any painting. For example, in a portrait, a viewer has an expectation of facial structure; differences from that expectation impact how the viewer sees the work. In a landscape or still life, the view has expectations of perspective. With a good drawing, the artist can be creative with other and techniques. At the beginning of this series, we will review facial structure and muscle groups and review your drawing. Participants will also review how the angle and tilt of the head impacts the artist’s view of the facial structure and how to translate into the drawing.
Next, you will explore color. Color creates emotion and can focus the viewer. Deconstructed color and unexpected colors excite and engage the viewer. You will explore color properties –mixing colors to maintain clarity, using complementary colors to focus and create excitement, exploring colors in highlights and shadows. You will explore different colors to use in portraits based on age and ethnicity.
We will also work on creating color unity, painting large areas of light and dark, backgrounds and losing edges and using color to create interest and emotion.
We will work on finding centers of interest and focusing our detail in the area of the center of interest. We will also work on composition and discuss improving our composition.
Then, you will apply what you have learned about drawing, and color and work from your photograph. We will explore what makes a good photograph to work from and how to crop the photograph and create interest and emotion for the viewer. You will work on creating focus, simplifying and using the photograph as a starting point to explore color and lose edges.
Each session will include a painting and will build on what has been covered in the prior session. The topics will be covered at the beginning of the session and the painting will focus on that session’s topic. While the first session covers anatomy, you may also paint subjects other than portraits.
See the supply list on the website.
About the Artist
Kathy Durdin is a national award winning watercolor and mixed media artist, and has exhibited and won awards in numerous watercolor exhibits across the US. She is a signature member of Southern, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tallahassee and Florida Suncoast Watercolor Societies. In 2013, she was featured in Watercolor Artist “Ones to Watch”. She was also the 2012 President of Florida Watercolor Society.
She has always loved watercolor as a medium while it is very unforgiving, its freshness cannot be replicated. Her style is loose, to take advantage of the characteristics of the medium.
As an artist, she wants to focus on what she connects with emotionally, people. She finds interesting people, situations and images all the time. She rarely works on posed situations, as she thinks informal interaction much more interesting. Watercolor provides her with a medium that allows her to create with work quickly and create paintings with freshness and immediacy as she expresses herself.
One of her other passions is color. She loves seeing how color drives emotion and how different colors blend and mingle on paper. She loves to experiment with color. She combines unusual, unexpected color combinations and invites her viewers to connect colors rather than mixing them on her palette. In representational work, she sees green and purple in faces, yellow in water and pink in skies. Her work needs to be viewed from a distance – small and large areas of color make up her images.
Kathy’s watercolors are explosions of color and creativity bringing the viewer into her imagination. Kathy combines unusual, unexpected color combinations and invites her viewers to connect colors rather than mixing them on her palette. She loves to connect the viewer with the person in the painting, looking for people who communicate with her. Kathy hopes that her paintings create an emotion in those who view them.