Well, I am delighted to report that I did well on day one of the Jean Pederson workshop. I accomplished all five goals (see yesterday’s post) from the workshop. And… NO MELTDOWNS! I am feeling so good. But let’s talk about what you all want to know, namely, what did we do.
Getting Started
To start the day, Jean gave us the briefest of lectures (love this) and then got us painting. We were told to bring 6 pieces of “scrap” paper in a large dimension each day. Then Jean played a song (see song list below painting) and encouraged us to feel (and paint) the colors of the song and make marks about how we felt about it.
I LOVED IT! This exercise reminded me a lot of Ruth Bunchanan’s first workshop, and the excellent painting song: The Hippopotomus Song by Flanders and Swan.
Sketching
By the time we finished this warm up, it was late in the morning, and we were treated to another lecture / demo. For the day’s class we would focus on flowers. She started us out by having us do 10 sketches of floral bouquets she put up on her screen (about 2 minutes per sketch.) Then we were to take our favorite of the sketches and re-draw it onto the ground of our choice, whether that was plain white paper (generally discourages) or one of the sketches from earlier in the day. In my usual work fast and don’t listen to directions way I added paint to one of the sketches.
Real Painting
Then I started on a different, real piece of paper (had a sort of peachy background).
It was hard because i struggled with some design elements, but I ended up pretty pleased, especially when Jean mocked up a mat for it!
During the various lectures, I did some sketching of my own. I added paint to this one because the sketching got away from me.
I like it.
Tomorrow we will be working on pure abstracts. I can’t wait.