"Red Bicycle, Paris", 11x14"

I think I could paint for a year using all the references I got in France over the last two weeks!  I was there with my mom and my niece to study the works and workspaces of the Impressionists.  One piece of information that stuck with me is that the Impressionists were quite scientific about their use of color. Complementary colors were used especially effectively by all of them.

In this piece, I used the complements purple/yellow to mix my grays, and I used red/green for the more vibrant colors.  I hope these lessons stay with me!

"Tuesday Morning", 5x7"

This past month has held a bumper crop of classes and workshops to be taught.  The palette knife painting above was created as a demo for one of my knife painting workshops, and I titled it "Tuesday Morning" simply because that is when it was painted!

Last month's marathon was culminated with a two day Color Theory workshop at Mainstreet in Lake Zurich, IL.  We pared our palettes down to five basic colors plus white, then got to mixing.  People were very surprised to learn that most of the "premixed" paint colors that we buy can be mixed using a simple palette-- including Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, and Viridian.  I still don't think they'd believe me if they hadn't mixed all these colors and then some on their own!

The last afternoon of the workshop, participants painted from black and white references and had to choose a color scheme: Monochromatic, Triadic, Complementary, Split Complementary, or Analagous.  Below are some of the paintings they created.  I was so excited to see the beautiful color harmonies they achieved!