Maija Baynes Painting Workshop

    January 24-26 were three days well spent in a painting workshop with Maija Baynes. It has been a while since I blogged about a class that I have taken and enjoyed so much.
For some reason I have not been able to get the feeling; "Oh I really want to paint that!"; therefore I paint nothing. Even my paint something silly did not get me out of my blank canvas block. The painting passion always returns but I never know how long it will take.
     I tried reading; Artist's Way, Color Choices, the new Acrylic Artist Magazine and Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light & Color.      Nada.

     Maija was a guest demonstrator at the Vero Beach Art Club meeting where she painted a still life. It dawned on me that part of my problem was that I have to visibly see the landscape or subject in front of me to be able to paint it. My brain had just shut down to printed subject materials. During the workshop I learned totally new painting techniques to paint a landscapes, cloud/skies and water/ reflections.
This gave me some new ammunition to move forward.

     Using a  tinted canvas and a limited palette we were instructed to sketch in the simple shapes of the subject's outline. No drawing, just take an old brush and scrumble in the basic shapes. I had to relearn scrumbling and to use a small amount of paint. My outline shapes had too many hard edges and my paint layer was way to thick. Maija paints from dark to light which threw me off a bit. She showed us how to combine a limited number of colors to get the full landscape palette. The logic was that a blending of a small number of colors  would  unifying the total painting.

Maija's palette

   

    The colors of the background contain more blues and grays, they are lighter with softer edges. Next she added red to the shaded areas of the paining and then proceeded to add mid and light tones of greens. The sky was done last which is the opposite of my technique.

      Maija deomonstrated how to mix the sky/ cloud colors before painting the sky. Note there were six different tones to the clouds! After that I had the knowledge to tackle my own sky. Pure white cotton ball clouds are a no, no from now on.

Maija's final painting

      The second day dealt with clouds and the third day focused on water reflections. Who knew reflections should be painted in the mirror image direction of the object? How can I miss little things that are so obvious?

Maija- Clouds

Maija's water reflections

     I know it was a good workshop because the time passed quickly and I was struggling which means I was learning and out side of my comfort zone!
Here are my three uncompleted attempts at landscape, a cloud scene and water with reflections:

My landscape

My clouds

I will finish these and post the final results for the world to ponder.

My water reflections