Travel, Read, Conserve

After a few months of training on charcoal and pastel drawing at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio , we started on our acrylics and watercolor journey. The prospect of being able to play with paint was exciting and daunting at the same time. I remember being all charged and ready to go paint colorful landscapes the first day, but I was really jumping ahead :) The first few lessons were spent on learning and really getting familiar with the color wheel, which sounds deceptively simple but in practice, is far from so. In our acrylic sessions, we used a limited color palette, and it was amazing to be able to create a very wide range of colors from just the three primary colors, and white, using a palette knife to control the portions of each color. For creating acrylic or watercolor paintings the basic techniques remain the same. We still started with creating several thumbnails to decide which composition we are most comfortable with to translate on to the canvas. The principal...

While painting a still life may be an organic, seamless, free flowing form of expression for the experienced artist; to an aspiring art student, it is the culmination of a sequence of steps for laying the foundation and building on top of it. I am trying to break down the process of creating a still life  painting into a few smaller steps, that have helped me immensely as a beginner. Setting the still life   This is done for us by Shruti Ghatak, our mentor and teacher, at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio . The thought that goes behind the setup and the meticulous arrangement makes it a pleasure and challenge at the same time to paint it. It determines the complexity of the painting by the number of objects used, the spatial relationship between those objects, the exact lighting on the setup that creates a very dramatic light & shade effect , folds added on a tablecloth so it creates the desired fluidity. Last but not the least, since we often use perishable objects s...