Day 4 of the Don Andrews Workshop

Partially complete "Melissa"

Don Andrews demos adding color for the light areas of the painting

Now things are beginning to come together for me. Don started the day demoing how to achieve hard, soft, and lost edges. This alone was worth the price of admission! In the afternoon he put it all together with a demo: (1) wet the paper and created colorful lights; (2) add form to the figure with a mid-tone value and create the edges as you go; (3) sandwich the figure with the background, creating interesting shapes. All the while we keep rewetting the sections we are working on.

We got to do two paintings today, one of each model doing 20-minute poses with 5-minute breaks. The afternoon session was the longest, spanning over two hours. I did Melissa in the afternoon on a full sheet. This snapshot is not the greatest and doesn't show a bit of the left side of the piece. I am fairly happy with it to this point. I need to find more edges by darkening some edges, do more work on the figure, and Don advises me that I should keep the leftmost white shape and get rid of the whites to the right. I had a glorious time doing this piece.

Lunch was also fun. Several of us ate at wrought iron tables under a luscious tree on the grounds of the Rosicrucian Museum. Then three of us walked briefly. The time flies when you are having fun.