Art2love -Watercolor by Jean

Due to hurricane Sandy our last class was postponed for a week. We did get together yesterday and it was a nice sunny day. I put a photo of some trees in the woods that had had some flooding from a storm, on the projector screen. I asked each student to use that photo for reference only. The sun shinning on the trees made them almost white, so we used masking tape to mask out the trees. I asked the students to pick a season, suggesting the colors that would reflect the time of the year they could choose. We proceeded to do the sky and around the trees, creating shadows as we painted. Later we removed the tape and painted in the trees.

I also painted a demo to show them my version in the fall season.



As you can see they chose different seasons and created lovely original paintings of their own.



One of my students baked some delicious brownies and we had a lovely sweets break to end the classes.

In my studio I have my desk right in front of a window that looks out on a beautiful vista of the farm across the way. It is wonderful to watch the seasons go by, not only by time and color, but by what my farmer neighbor plants. Winter wheat and then corn. After harvesting the corn, he plants soybeans. My favorite crop is the soybean. It comes up as little shoots of green that grow into rows of little bushes. It turns a gold yellow and gradually a honey golden brown. I just love that color. It then turns a grey brown and it ready to harvest. With the trees behind the field starting to turn in fall colors and the soy that honey color I love, I decided to paint the landscape I see each day out my window.



Would you believe? A day after I finished my painting the harvest equipment came in and took away all my lovely soybeans. They then fertilized and spread seed for winter wheat again. There are a bunch of birds on the field gorging themselves on the seed or maybe bugs that have been overturned from the planting.