I will be teaching a watercolor portrait class at Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper in Copperopolis, California. These classes are small, with no more than 6 or 7 students, so I can give personal attention to everyone, no matter what their level experience.
Watercolor is the perfect medium for painting translucent, lifelike portraits of faces. Learn how to choose a photo, draw your image, and paint a face in watercolor.
I have been painting in watercolor for 15 years, and am excited to help you learn to use the sometimes difficult medium of watercolor.
Using demonstrations, practice exercises, and fearless paint slinging, I will teach you to trust in your paint, brushes, water. And most importantly, I will help you trust your own intuitions as you memorialize your favorite photos, and make personal remembrances of photos of your loved ones.
Bring your watercolors, paper, and some photos that you’d like to translate into a painting.
To register, call 209/785-2050 or email Larry {at} TownHallArts {dot} com
To find out more about Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper, visit their website: http://www.townhallarts.com
I also teach private classes at my home studio. For more information, email me at Mockingbirdatmidnight {at} gmail {dot} com.
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The gallery below is from a life drawing session. Click on an image to see them at larger size.
Watercolor portraits
20-minutes each
The resting hand
Watercolor from life
Matt seated
10-minute pose
Watercolor on paper
Matt standing
10 minute standing pose
Watercolor on paper
Nearly every Thursday I go to Town Hall Arts/Galerie Copper in Copperopolis for life drawing. (It’s uninstructed, but if you live near there, you should attend. It’s a great group and we’re all happy to help if you’re a beginner.) I’ve been doing this for nearly 2 years. Life drawing really helps sharpen my drawing skills. Plus, it’s just plain fun.
For the last 6 months I’ve been trying to figure out how watercolor can work for me in life drawing. Last Thursday I didn’t use a pencil at all. It was just me, the model, and brush, paint, water and paper.
There are so many things to juggle in my head when I’m painting this way. Not only am I trying to get the proportions right, but I also have to think—all at the same time—about negative space, value, shape, and what trouble the water and paint is going to get into when it hits the paper.
I’ve been thinking a lot about giving up my attachment to my end product. Painting this way is a little like I imagine jumping off a cliff in one of those crazy wingsuits would be like. Terrifying and exhilarating. Although if I make a mistake painting, there’s only a pile of chewed up paper and my bloodied ego in a pile on the floor, rather than a broken body.
Following the advice of fellow artist, Gayle Lorraine, when I start, I whisper to myself, “Let’s just waste paint and paper today.” It gives me the freedom to screw up, which also means that I work more intuitively, letting what I already know drive my hand.
There’s something else about that attitude: I make more work, which means I’m practicing more, entering into more conversations with my materials.
And as my mom always told me, practice makes perfect. Although I’m not so worried about perfection.
Which is perfect.
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This is my watercolor kit for traveling. It’s small, fits in my laptop case, and I can paint almost anywhere with it. Clockwise from top left: Sakura Sumo Grip mechanical pencil; Aquash Watercolor brush; Windsor Newton travel paint box; Handbook Artist Journal (5.5″ x 5.5″).
I admit, we are stay-at-home types. I didn’t use to be, but after we bought the Tree House, it seems like I never want to leave. As a result, we don’t travel much. But this summer seems to be our summer of criss-crossing the country.
First there was a girls-gone-wild week in Eastern Nevada with my traveling red-headed friend. She’s been spending the first few years of her retirement seeing the West from her Toyota Tacoma. Oh my, but that was fun. We were really out of control. I mean, we had TWO bags of cheesy poofs! We stayed up until 10! We talked to strangers!
Then there were two weeks on the east coast with the fiddler, wrapped in humidity that boggled my mind. (I’m from the arid West, where, if the thermometer drops much below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I wear a wrap to ward off the cold. In Connecticut at 86 degrees, I sincerely considered just how naked I could get before I would upstage the bride.)
Being on the road; or in the air; or at a wedding; or touring New England means there was little time to drag out the sketchbook and draw, or unpack the plein air supplies and paint.
The best time to paint turned out to be on the airplane. Boredom and enforced stillness turns on my creative tap. I need to spend more time being bored.
I took it upon myself to be the dream giver, but one of the other passengers was my proxy model.
Detail of couple sleeping and the dreams I gave them.
If you think this blog might be of comfort to someone, please share it
I will be teaching a watercolor portrait class at Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper in Copperopolis, California.
Watercolor is the perfect medium for painting translucent, lifelike portraits of faces. Learn how to choose a photo, draw your image, and paint a face in watercolor.
I have been painting in watercolor for 15 years, and am excited to help you learn to use the sometimes difficult medium of watercolor.
Using demonstrations, practice exercises, and fearless paint slinging, I will teach you to trust in your paint, brushes, water. And most importantly, I will help you trust your own intuitions as you memorialize your favorite photos, and make personal remembrances of photos of your loved ones.
About Copperopolis
Copperopolis is a tiny town at the base of the Sierra Nevada. It’s about 2 hours from the Bay Area along one of the most incredibly beautiful highways (Highway 4) in California. You’re close to lodging in Sonora, wine tasting in Murphys (we have 28 wineries!), and all the wonders the Sierra has to offer.
Start your weekend off right with a watercolor class on Friday, then segue into some plein air painting in the mountains for the rest of weekend, or just relax, have some wine, and enjoy.
How to register for the watercolor portrait class
To register, call 209/785-2050 or email Larry {at} TownHallArts {dot} com
To find out more about Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper, visit their website: http://www.townhallarts.com
I also teach private classes at my home studio. For more information, email me at Mockingbirdatmidnight {at} gmail {dot} com.
To see more portraits, look in the sidebar channel to the right.
If you think this blog might be of comfort to someone, please share it
Once a week I attend a life drawing session. I love figure drawing more than doing just about anything else (except maybe eating ice cream).
But for the last few months I’ve really been struggling; I’ve been looking for something in my work, a change, a way of seeing. Trouble is, I’m not sure what it is that I’m searching for. It’s something that I can’t yet define.
Other artists tell me they search too, stumbling towards a foggy idea that morphs and shifts as soon as they think they’re near. The mind’s eye is often myopic. It’s not unusual.
It is frustrating, all those failed experiments, the ghastly embarrassments, the ever-growing stacks of used-up paper. On some days, it seems it would be easier to throw away the paintbrushes and become something simpler, a neurosurgeon maybe, or a nuclear physicist.
My brain, smarter than my heart, says, “give it up. Go watch a movie instead.” But my stubborn and desperate heart over rules my brain. The part of my soul that aches after painting is ever hopeful each time I stand up to the easel that this time…no…okay…this time…argh!….no, really, this time for sure I’m going to have the breakthrough I’m looking for.
I keep looking. I’m ever hopeful that one day I’ll paint around a hair-pin turn and suddenly the thing I’m looking for—the thing I can’t even describe or identify on a map—will come into focus and I”ll be able to grab it.
“There you are, you little monkey,” I’ll exclaim, clutching at it before it can get away.
Which of course means it must get away. Because if it doesn’t wriggle from my hand and dance back into the dimly lit future, it’ll die in my cramped and rigid fist. Then where will my artistic vision be?
I like to know it’s there in the half-light of my mind, taunting me, teasing me with occasional flashes of clarity (usually when I’m in the shower). So I slog on, trying to paint smartly, fearlessly, easily. And as I feel my way through the dark, every so often a faint light will glimmer across a portion of my work. A brush stroke that shows the turn of a shoulder. A happy color choice. A gracefully proportionate figure. And that flicker will be enough to keep me going.
Small steps. Baby steps. Sometimes steps that go backwards. That’s all I can do as an artist: Put one foot in front of the other and keep working. Because it’s the thing that makes my heart sing, even when I’m grinding my teeth with frustration.
How about you, dear readers? What are you stretching for in your art? Share in the comments how you keep yourself working.
20-minute pose in watercolor
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Strength, grace, beauty and an abiding love; that’s what I saw the first time I watched gymnast Gasya Akhmetova-Atherton and her daughter Kamali balance together in an Instagram video. Gasya, a former Cirque du Soleil performer, stands on her hands and raises her legs into a graceful arabesque above her head; little Kamali clings to her mother’s neck and points her toes in imitation of her mama.
I itched to paint a portrait of them.
But it wasn’t only the sheer amazement of Gasya’s Insta-videos that made me want to honor them in paint. Gasya is a tremendous athlete, doing things that seem nearly extra-human, but it was the joyful bond she shares with her daughter that I wanted to try to capture.
As I watched this mother-daughter team, I thought of my own mother. Something about the line of Gasya’s legs and the steadiness of her balance brought to mind a fleeting image of being held when I was a child by my own mother.
My mom certainly wasn’t an athlete (although she did play tennis at the local park). But she was strong; she played and worked hard. She was reliable; we clung to her like little monkeys as she negotiated every day life. And she was loving; she dispensed hugs and kisses like they were daily vitamins.
I never had kids; I never got the chance. And so I am always amazed at the strength it takes for women to balance life with children. Moms teeter under the weight of their little ones, and they do their best to defy gravity and keep their kids (and themselves) from falling.
Yeah. Moms rock. Every day of the year.
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Runner before the race Watercolor portrait of Sue Loncaric. In this image, she’s ready for a run uphill through sand, but she’s looking forward to it. This was a fun portrait, done from a photo Sue sent me. I took liberties with the landscape, but I feel like I caught her happy, forward-looking personality.
Changing times, changing ages
I had my first corporate job in my early 40s, in an industry awash with 20-somethings just out of college. Surrounded by ripe youth—dewy skin, perky body parts, and eyes made liquid by black pupils dilated to an alarming, and some say, alluring degree—I admit that I felt a little bit…well, dried up.
Whew. I wish I were still so young as 40! But I’m learning to how to move into age. It’s not easy in our youth obsessed culture. We don’t have a clear road map.
But I think times are changing. We boomers who in our youth demanded so much from society are on track to reform and retell the crone mythology. New role models help us transition from maiden to mother to crone.
From fashionistas like Lynn Slater at Accidental Icon (There’s a link to an interview with her at the bottom of this post) who have made it safe for those of us over 50 to wear leopard print pedal pushers, to Leyla Giray Alyanak , who pushes the 60-and-over envelope of journalism, world travel, and feisty-hot chick at Women on the Road, we crones are keeping alive the beauty, promise, and freshness of the spring maiden. We’re thumbing our noses at society’s outmoded expectations and enjoying the heck out of life.
I have to admit, I was amazed when I met (through the internet) Sue Loncaric. Sue started running at 50, an age when most of us start having trouble getting up from the floor. Five years later she ran her first full marathon. She didn’t sit around in her jammies after retirement, but instead chose to reinvent herself and start a new business. She blogs at Sizzling towards 60, not just about aging issues, but about life in general. Just because we’re aging doesn’t mean we focus only on our age!
I’m grateful that Sue agreed to a bloggy interview (a blogaview?). She is a great example of how we can at the same time wear the blush of the maiden and the wrinkles of the crone, and how beautifully they can work together.
Racing through midlife but loving every minute
Sue Loncaric running a marathon. The new image of age: vibrant, healthy, strong, and gorgeous.
Do you feel different now than you did when you were a young woman? How is it different?
I am far more self-confident in my 50s than I ever was as a young woman. When I was younger I was plagued by body image issues and the feeling of never being good enough. I think the problem is we don’t feel we are entitled to love ourselves, but as you age, you realize that you are unique.
You have lived life and have the scars to prove it! You know that you are strong, and you acknowledge that you do have a voice and people actually are listening. I have come to terms with ‘being me’ and I have finally come to love the person who is ‘me’. I wish I had learned that much earlier on in life and that would be one piece of advice I would give to young women.
What freedoms has age given you?
I think the biggest freedom age gives us is time. Or as I call it “Me Time”. Time to do exactly what we want to do, when we want to do it without feeling guilty or being tied down by the responsibilities of life. Time to fulfill long-held dreams that you have pushed to the back of your mind.
For most women up until midlife, our lives are defined by being a wife/partner, motherhood and our career. Once we reach the empty nest stage, we are also usually slowing down in our careers and we can finally start to put our needs first. Now we can explore horizons and goals. I started a blog which I never thought I would do. Having time to travel for longer periods and explore the world has been a wonderful freedom for me and my husband.
I think you feel braver to try new things when you are older. Well, that is my case. I discovered running at 50 and ran my first marathon at 55, something I never thought I would be capable of.
How have you learned to grow old? Who taught or is teaching you? Have you had role models?
I don’t know if I learned to grow old necessarily, because in my mind I still feel young! I have had two special women in my life who have shown me that making each day count and taking opportunities to enjoy life is most important as we age.
I also am always inspired by much older people who are still achieving. They have a purpose in their lives and I think that is important. You should never give up on life. We should keep learning and experiencing new things as long as possible.
You’re moving into winter where you live, right? So, if seasons are a metaphor, how do you keep spring in your heart when your age is moving into winter?
I regularly turn to my ‘inner child’ and have FUN. Spending time with my grandson has taught me to appreciate the simple joys that life can bring.
I’m convinced that being healthy and happy is the secret to enjoying the ‘winter of your life’ with ‘spring in your heart’. It is all about attitude and having the right mindset. I call it Positive Aging (a term I heard last year and it really captured how I wanted to age).
We all have choices, we can give up and feel that life is almost over or we can make the most of each day and appreciate life! If we aren’t happy with life we need to make changes to ensure that the ‘winter of life’ is as exciting and uplifting as ‘spring’. We only have one shot!
Since taking early retirement, Sue Loncaric found she needed more in her life and Sizzling Towards Sixty was born. She shares her journey through midlife to encourage others to join with her in her quest to live a fit, active and fun life. Sue loves connecting with people and helping them realize their full potential to be the best they can be.
Her e-book ‘From Couchpotato to Fabulously Fit in Less Time than you Think’ has evolved into a Facebook Group #couchpotatotofabfit and encourages others to Get Healthier Together. Plans for online self-development courses are on the way.
Stone thrower (African Elephant) Visit my Etsy shop to learn the story of this elephant
From now until World Elephant Day in August in I’m offering a limited run of prints of two of my watercolors of elephants. These elephants live at the facility of the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). You can buy the prints at MargaretSloan.etsy.com. A portion of the proceeds for each sale will go to PAWS to help support the elephants.
I’ve always had a thing for elephants, ever since watching the documentary The African Elephant when I was a kid. The more I learn about them, the more I think they are a sentient species (as far as I can understand sentience). They have complicated family relationships, they mourn death and celebrate life, and they display a sharp intelligence. And don’t forget their proverbial memory.
It was the highlight of 2015 that I was able to get close enough to really observe these magnificent animals. Last fall I was privileged to visit Ark 2000, an animal sanctuary of the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), an organization that rescues animals used in the entertainment industry—think circuses, animal shows, and, yes, zoos—and provides a place for them to retire. They have large roaming areas, ponds, heated barns, good food. And they don’t have to work any more. They just get to be the animals they are.
I’ve blogged about that trip before. Here are some of the highlights.
Some of the elephants at PAWS had been mistreated in their former working lives, or were stolen from their mothers as little babies. Some witnessed elephants killing elephants; possibly some witnessed humans killing their mothers. It’s a wonder that the animals at PAWS have been able to overcome their past traumas to form attachments with the humans that care for them. There are a trio of Africans who throw stones at cars, but other elephants we met were just as curious about us as we were about them.
We got to meet Nicholas personally. He rumbled low as his keeper showed us how they had convinced Nicholas to open his mouth for dental inspection, or show them the bottom of his ottoman-sized feet. I don’t like to use the word trained. Really what they’ve done is learned how to communicate with the animals, and they’ve done it in a way that doesn’t involve pain or punishment. If these animals consent to a dental examination, or present their ottoman-sized feet for a checkup, it’s because they want to. Not because someone is stabbing them with a bullhook.
That brilliant day I couldn’t stop sketching. I could have drawn Nicholas all day long as he snuffled through a pile of bran meal on the floor and purred his elephant growl.
Drawing portraits in person always brings me closer to my subject, and drawing Nicholas was no different. I could feel an intelligence there, a being that knew exactly who he was and who accepted that a small female humana was observing him while he observed her.
Nicholas: Asian Elephant Visit my Etsy shop to learn the story of this elephant
PAWS also does education outreach about “energy conservation, conservation of wildlife habitat, and recognition of animals as individuals with a right to peace and dignity.”
You can own one (or two) of these beautiful prints and help support the elephants at PAWS.
I will be teaching a watercolor portrait class at Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper in Copperopolis, California.
Watercolor is the perfect medium for painting translucent, lifelike portraits of faces. Learn how to choose a photo, draw your image, and paint a face in watercolor.
I have been painting in watercolor for 15 years, and am excited to help you learn to use the sometimes difficult medium of watercolor.
Using demonstrations, practice exercises, and fearless paint slinging, I will teach you to trust in your paint, brushes, water. And most importantly, I will help you trust your own intuitions as you memorialize your favorite photos, and make personal remembrances of photos of your loved ones.
To register, call 209/785-2050 or email Larry {at} TownHallArts {dot} com
To find out more about Town Hall Arts/Gallery Copper, visit their website: http://www.townhallarts.com
For more information about the watercolor portrait class, email me at Mockingbirdatmidnight {at} gmail {dot} com.
If you think this blog might be of comfort to someone, please share it
Mockingbirds at midnight 