Carol Marine Workshop

(Carol...painting during a morning demo)

Last week my good friend, Brenda Ferguson, and I had the awesome opportunity to participate in one of Carol Marine's workshops. Carol, a daily painter, trekked from Texas to South Freeport, Maine where fifteen artists were lucky enough to spend three days soaking in all she had to offer. Challenging as it was at times (okay...most of the time!), I had an absolute blast and came away with a wealth of information.

Thanks, Carol!

Scroll on to see my efforts from Carol's workshop assignments...

Our first exercise was to set up and paint a still life of our choice.

We had one hour to complete this task. 

We then moved on to timed exercises in values using only burnt umber.

The idea here was to create a still life set up which showed a dominant amount of one value, a lesser amount of another, and a 'smidge' of a third...and then paint it as such!

Here, we divided a small panel (this was just 7x5) into six sections. We were given a set time (10 minutes/section) to repeatedly paint the same subject - hoping for improvement, of course.  Being that I had to 'wipe' my first attempt in the top left, I'd say this was a valuable exercise for me!

(no pun intended!)

This was my final painting on the last day.

Fun to do, but not quite the end result I was hoping for.

I was beat...yet exhilarated!

Shortly after returning home, I decided to attempt one last painting of the same little cherry from the workshop (the tomatoes had run their course!). Though it was done on a panel, rather than my usual paste paper background, I did switch from oils back to the comfort of my acrylics for this one.