Scott Gellatly

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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Workshop Recap - Cooper Mt. Natural Area

Hats off to all the wonderful participants who braved the near-one hundred-degree heat to paint together at the Cooper Mountain Natural Area! Luckily for us, there was enough shade to paint from and we managed to pack the 8-hour workshop with plenty of painting and color discussions.

 Paintings by Kay Elmore. Photos by Nancy Klos.

Cooper Mountain Natural Area provides terrific lessons in atmospheric perspective as well as mixing diverse greens. We all worked from the same "split-primary" color palette, using a warm and cool for each of the primary.  From this, I gave a demonstration on subtractive color mixing and mixing greens with the colors at hand. 
Color demo. 

I had all of the students come with a 12" x 16" panel taped off into four sections for them to produce four paintings throughout the day. The small scale as well as the time constraints prevented them from getting to detailed in their work and focus on economy of mark-making. This proved to be a welcome challenge for many of the students, but most of them got all four paintings completed throughout the course of the day. 

Below are my demonstrations from the day. My next Portland-area workshop is July 28th at the Blue Heron Herbary on Sauvie Island.  If you're interested in joining us to paint the lavender, please let me know - only a few spots remain!