:: Jane Blundell’s Workshop ::

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon.
In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
For nothing is more precious than the life force & may the love of that force guide you as you go.
― Patti Smith.

What an incredible weekend filled with watercolour demos, instruction, theory & practical hands-on exercises… which I have not finished yet, I might add. Jane Blundell is an amazing watercolour teacher — her speciality is really colours and the theory behind it, but she is also an amazing artist. We were 11 students at the Centre communautaire de Lachine which is perfect workshop space… we all had good chairs, good tables, good lighting and it was mostly quiet… apart from a few musical bursts that were flowing in from downstairs as there was a wedding preparation going on, and eventually the ceremony started.

I received so much information that my head is still whirling, in a good way. One of the things that I retained is that when starting a new sketchbook, as the first page is always daunting, why not create a colour wheel of your present palette? An idea… She also made us create five different colour wheels, going from bright clean colours to earth colours and then we had to apply that colour wheel to a pear painting, only using those three primary colours — the triad. Here is one example. We painted from a reference photo and the aim was to get the colours down and not try to paint perfectly… with that I am quite good! Ask me to mess up a painting, and I can! Well joke aside, it was really nice to do and the only ting that I would change is the background colour … I should have put a cool colour combo in the background and that would have helped the foreground to move forward… as everyone knows that warm colours move forward and cool colours move backwards? Just testing you -)))

Paper: Travelogue Handbook Sketchbook
Pencil
Colours: New Gambodge (warm), Sennelier Red (cool) & French Ultramarine (warm)
Location: Centre communautaire de Lachine