Skip Lawrence Workshop ~ Day 3, Wednesday ~ Watercolor by Texas Daily Painter Nancy Standlee

Figure Watercolor 21" x 14
(some stamping, and Caran d'Ache)

Small Watercolor approx. 6" x 9" from Monday's starts

The Skip Lawrence workshop: Our days begin with a slide show discussing and showing examples of what our goal is for the day and for me, this is a good way to work. He talks about famous paintings and then Skip will demo and then we usually get some painting in before lunch and paint until about 2:30 and then we all benefit and enjoy a lengthy critique. Wednesday was all about the treatment of edges in designing a painting and in the top painting I tried to get a good variety of edges. It is really hard not to draw and fill in the blanks coloring book style. And yes, we want hard, soft and a variation of edges and then anything goes to get some interest such as scratch, splatter, smudging to give those edges some gradation and to travel from one shape to another in the process of connecting things. He kept telling us change colors but keep the same value. Things he has repeated are "You can't paint what it looks like but paint what it feels like" and "we separate things we should be connecting."
On the smaller painting above I took one of the Monday starts and painted and added some watercolor crayon to it. It's nice to have these extra starts to work on while others dry or you're wondering what the heck do I do now.
Wednesday was a long day for Skip as after class we had our SWS meeting and he gave a demo to a packed house. Stephen Quiller was there and some from his class at the Artists' Showplace.
I'll post slides of some of Skip's work later in the week. We are all enjoying the workshop and our workshop chairman, Pattie Bowler, has been taking care of all the details and doing a great job of taking care of us. She will be our next SWS president. Students are pushing their art supplies aside and eating at their work space or painting and eating and afraid to leave our upstairs cocoon ..afraid we'll miss something.

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BLOG.............Nancy Standlee Art Blog

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WEB SITE ........Canvas By Canvas

ARLINGTON TEXAS ~ ARTIST NANCY STANDLEE ~ DAILY PAINTER ~
CONTEMPORARY ~ WATERCOLOR ~ ACRYLIC ~ COLLAGE ~ GOUACHE
ABSTRACT ~ EXPRESSIONIST ~ ART FOR SALE ~ FIGURATIVE ~ MIXED MEDIA ~ ALTERED BOOKS

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Skip Lawrence Workshop ~ Day 2, Tuesday ~ Watercolor by Texas Daily Painter Nancy Standlee

Watercolor approx. 12" x 10


Watercolor Approximately 21" x 14"

Today it was about "A Lot and a Little" and Balance. Skip Lawrence presented a slide show giving examples of famous paintings to show a simple approach to design and in a short, short summary for example if you have a lot of busy, put in a little calm or if you have lots of large shapes make sure to add a few small shapes.
We could paint whatever we wanted but apply some of the ideas he presented in the demo and lecture with the admonition "Don't do what you always do, try something else." Today I began adding some pure clean colors and no opaque but I could use black and white as pure colors then have the rest of the painting in neutrals. I must admit these two looked a little blah and I did add a little color enhancement in Photoshop Elements.
In the critique at the end of the day, Skip liked the top painting better and one of the reasons the bottom one was the flowers at the neck looked too realistic and he wanted the figure to go into the background more.
What really happened on the top one was the result of a very sad portrait and I didn't care what happened to it and just started painting some figures and making marks. On the bottom one I began on a clean white sheet of paper with some drawing in pencil and charcoal and it was more labored. Maybe I need to start painting over old paintings? Some in the class are using acrylics. I know one thing for my own work, after using acrylics for awhile....I really like acrylics and I'm fighting the watercolor trying to get them to act like acrylics. Skip uses lots of watercolor pigment with little water. I finally brought in some oil painting bristle brushes today and I imagined my little watercolors were screaming without their little soft sables. Skip did say that for his larger work he does use acrylics but he can paint a full sheet figure with watercolor and it can make it do tricks like an acrylic. I can't. I think I may remove that "yellow hand/arm" tomorrow in the lower painting. It's definitely a bother to me.
Watch for a slide show later in the week of Skip's work and demos.

Please visit my web site and comment on my blog:

BLOG.............Nancy Standlee Art Blog

WEB SITE ........Nancy Standlee

WEB SITE ........Canvas By Canvas

ARLINGTON TEXAS ~ ARTIST NANCY STANDLEE ~ DAILY PAINTER ~
CONTEMPORARY ~ WATERCOLOR ~ ACRYLIC ~ COLLAGE ~ GOUACHE
ABSTRACT ~ EXPRESSIONIST ~ ART FOR SALE ~ FIGURATIVE ~ MIXED MEDIA ~ ALTERED BOOKS

Contact NancyStandlee@sbcglobal.net

Skip Lawrence Workshop ~ Watercolor and Acrylic by Texas Daily Painter Nancy Standlee

Watercolor on 140 lb paper
Skip Lawrence is in Dallas for the Southwestern Watercolor Society for a 5 day workshop at Asel Art. Can you imagine the temptation of being upstairs and over one of the largest art supply stores in Dallas and being enticed at every break. Fortunately they do not run a tab but you pay at every purchase. Skip was scheduled in February but was snowed in and I think everyone showed up today as we have a full house. I will post a slide show later in the week of some of his demo paintings.
We spent the day talking about how art is personal and we explored how to make our art personal and unique to us. He cautioned us not to copy him but to take chances and paint some of our own ideas. Skip talked about Georgia O'Keeffe and how different her floral paintings were.

Georgia O'Keeffe - "I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to ... I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way-- things I had no words for."


Skip talked to us about how a painting needs a good technique, design and ideas. To get us started we took a full sheet and taped it off into 9 sections and tried to turn some of our emotions into ideas. For example, sad, lonely, a sunny day, a party at Pattie's were some I tried. I didn't get finished but had to move on to start my larger painting. It was not working on my half sheet of paper so I turned it around and tried to find a mood and refined with some figures. It may or may not be finished.

Please visit my web site and comment on my blog:

BLOG.............Nancy Standlee Art Blog

WEB SITE ........Nancy Standlee

WEB SITE ........Canvas By Canvas

ARLINGTON TEXAS ~ ARTIST NANCY STANDLEE ~ DAILY PAINTER ~
CONTEMPORARY ~ WATERCOLOR ~ ACRYLIC ~ COLLAGE ~ GOUACHE
ABSTRACT ~ EXPRESSIONIST ~ ART FOR SALE ~ FIGURATIVE ~ MIXED MEDIA ~ ALTERED BOOKS

Contact NancyStandlee@sbcglobal.net