Sea Serpent Design

Check out Rosalind Lord's illustration on her website, Sea Serpent Design.

Work from Painting with Water Media Class

Christine Kibre: mixed media collage | watercolor | photo transfer

 Chloe Meyer: ink, watercolor, gouache

Juan: acrylic pour | mixed media

 Sharon Esker: three mixed-media collages

David Baxter: Tantric watercolor

FINAL ASSIGNMENT #5 WATERMEDIA CLASS

For your final assignment, I would like you to start collecting interesting images, forms and colors from magazines.  Through the next few weeks you will create a series of collages on 8 x 10 paper.  The paper can be sketchbook pages, drawing, or copy paper.  Through this investigation, you will decide on a final project using any media. You can use collage in your final assignment along with watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, or any other media that you want to enhance your project. You can do a series of work, or just a single piece.  Consider materials, proportion of page, content, color, subject matter, composition, and size. Most of the class will be devoted to working on your project.  We will stop working at 8:45 to appreciate eachothers work.  Bring all the work that you made in class!

See you then. 

Feel free to email with questions: francesca@pastineart.com

This artwork, Bird with displaced color by Rosemarie Trockel  ink and watercolor

Water Media Assignment #4

Leonie Guyer will guide the class through a series of exercises on "seeing" using gouache to paint geometrical shapes that reveal compositional strategies and subtle color shifts.  . Bring all your brushes, watercolors, and paper.  Leonie will supply gouache, but if you have some, please bring your own.

 Untitled, FR-33, 2010, colored pencil and graphite pencil on old French paper (18th-19th century), 10 3/4 x 10 in.

Water Media Assignment #3

Mel Prest will demonstrate photo ink-jet-image transfers and acrylic pour techniques.  Bring an ink-jet print that is abstract or semi abstract, watercolor block and watercolor pad.

The work of Val Britton

Val Britton is a Bay Area artist whose work is concerned with mapping distances. She uses inks, gouache and collage to create the constellations of land masses and highway routes against what looks like distant galaxies.

Assignment #2 Water Media Class

Assignment #2

CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT
With washes, inks, plastic wrap, blowing techniques, gouache and pen, we can create imaginary environments.

Watercolor
waterclor block
Watercolor pad
Gouache
Ink
Pens
Salt
Plastic Wrap
Water Spritzer
cooked spaghetti

Wengechi Mutu at Suzanne Veilmetter Projects

Wangechi Mutu has a show opening at Suzanne Veilmetter Projects

Flowers by Kim McCarthy

Kim McCarthy at Morgan Lehman Gallery.

True Blue Stands Out... article in NYT

 

Science

True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd

Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

 

By NATALIE ANGIER

Published: October 22, 2012

 

NATURAL COLOR: Wild blueberries ready for harvesting in Warren, Me.

For the French Fauvist painter and color gourmand Raoul Dufy, blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.” Darkened red looks brown and whitened red turns pink, Dufy said, while yellow blackens with shading and fades away in the light. But blue can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and “it will always stay blue.”

Multimedia

The Blues Have It

Related

• Blue Through the Centuries: Sacred and Sought After (October 23, 2012)

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They’re exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe.

One research team recently reported the structural analysis of a small, dazzlingly blue fruit from the African Pollia condensata plant that may well be the brightest terrestrial object in nature. Another group working in the central Congo basin announced the discovery of a new species of monkey, a rare event in mammalogy. Rarer still is the noteworthiest trait of the monkey, called the lesula: a patch of brilliant blue skin on the male’s buttocks and scrotal area that stands out from the surrounding fur like neon underpants.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

As a raft of surveys has shown, blue love is a global affair. Ask people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green. Just one in six Americans is blue-eyed, but nearly one in two consider blue the prettiest eye color, which could be why some 50 percent of tinted contact lenses sold are the kind that make your brown eyes blue.

Sick children like their caretakers in blue: A recent study at the Cleveland Clinic found that young patients preferred nurses wearing blue uniforms to those in white or yellow. And am I the only person in the United States who doesn’t own a single pair of those permanently popular pants formerly known as dungarees?

“For Americans, bluejeans have a special connotation because of their association with the Old West and rugged individualism,” said Steven Bleicher, author of “Contemporary Color: Theory and Use.” The jeans take their John Wayne reputation seriously. “Because the indigo dye fades during washing, everyone’s blue becomes uniquely different,” said Dr. Bleicher, a professor of visual arts at Coastal Carolina University. “They’re your bluejeans.”

According to psychologists who explore the complex interplay of color, mood and behavior, blue’s basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.

In a study that appeared in the journal Perceptual & Motor Skills, researchers at Aichi University in Japan found that subjects who performed a lengthy video game exercise while sitting next to a blue partition reported feeling less fatigued and claustrophobic, and displayed a more regular heart beat pattern, than did people who sat by red or yellow partitions.

In the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia described their study of how computer screen color affected participants’ ability to solve either creative problems — for example, determining the word that best unifies the terms “shelf,” “read” and “end” (answer: book) — or detail-oriented tasks like copy editing. The researchers found that blue screens were superior to red or white backgrounds at enhancing creativity, while red screens worked best for accuracy tasks. Interestingly, when participants were asked to predict which screen color would improve performance on the two categories of problems, big majorities deemed blue the ideal desktop setting for both.

But skies have their limits, and blue can also imply coldness, sorrow and death. On learning of a good friend’s suicide in 1901, Pablo Picasso fell into a severe depression, and he began painting images of beggars, drunks, the poor and the halt, all famously rendered in a palette of blue.

The provenance of using “the blues” to mean sadness isn’t clear, but L. Elizabeth Crawford, a professor of psychology at the University of Richmond in Virginia, suggested that the association arose from the look of the body when it’s in a low energy, low oxygen state. “The lips turn blue, there’s a blue pallor to the complexion,” she said. “It’s the opposite of the warm flushing of the skin that we associate with love, kindness and affection.”

Blue is also known to suppress the appetite, possibly as an adaptation against eating rotten meat, which can have a bluish tinge. “If you’re on a diet, my advice is, take the white bulb out of the refrigerator and put in a blue one instead,” Dr. Bleicher said. “A blue glow makes food look very unappetizing.”

Not so to those that would dine upon us. Field studies of color-coded insect traps have shown that mosquitoes are particularly attracted to blue.

That blue can connote coolness and tranquillity is one of nature’s little inside jokes. Blue light is on the high-energy end of the visible spectrum, and the comparative shortness of its wavelengths explains why the blue portion of the white light from the sun is easily scattered by the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in our atmosphere, and thus why the sky looks blue.

Down on earth, organisms assume many of their colors with pigments, chemical substances that selectively absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others — the ones we then see as the object’s color. Plants look green because the chlorophyll pigment in their leaves absorbs pretty much all sunlight except green. Cardinals owe their flaming feathers to carotenoids, orange-reflecting pigments the birds extract from ingested berries and insects.

When it comes to blueness, though, the chemical approach is not always an option. Fungi, crabs and beetles may do cerulean, said the Yale ornithologist Richard O. Prum, “but for some reason, vertebrate physiology never evolved the ability to make or use blue pigments.”

In place of blue pigment, vertebrates and others turn to figment. As Dr. Prum and others have determined lately, many of nature’s most spectacular blues — the plumage of a blue jay or indigo bunting, the teal of a skink lizard’s tail, and now the lesula monkey’s blue scrotum and Pollia’s shimmering blue fruit — are structural in nature. They arise from the specific shape and arrangement of their underlying components.

“When you have a color obtained with pigment, it’s a characteristic of the material itself,” said Silvia Vignolini, a physicist at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the new report about the Pollia condensata. “When you make color with structure, you start with a material that is transparent, but by changing the structure by just a few hundred nanometers” — billionths of a meter — “you can change the color.”

Dr. Vignolini cited the analogy of soap bubbles, which begin as clear liquid and then assume different hues depending on their size, the thickness of their membranes and the angle at which they’re viewed. Structural blues are essentially built of soap membranes trapped at just the right orientation and thickness to forever glint blue.

Stacking style counts, too. Sometimes the color-forming components are arrayed in a so-called quasi-ordered formation, a mix of regularity and randomness, like spaghetti packed in a box. That pattern yields the steady matte blues of the jay’s feathers and the monkey’s pelvis. In other cases, the constituent bubbles are more strongly periodic in their arrangement, like atoms in a crystal, and the resulting blues possess the glittering, iridescent sheen seen in the wings of a blue morpho butterfly or, brighter still, the Pollia fruit. Dr. Vignolini and her colleagues determined that the lentil-size fruit reflected back 30 percent of the light cast upon it, the highest reflectivity for any land-based biological product known.

The bold blue covering turns out to be a bit of a cheap trick, designed to attract birds and other potential seed dispersers without bothering to invest in the expensive quid pro quo of a pulp. “The fruit has no nutritional value,” Dr. Vignolini said. “It doesn’t harm birds, but it doesn’t benefit them, either.”

The ruse doesn’t fade with time. “We have some samples in our collection that are almost 100 years old,” Dr. Vignolini said, “and they look the same as the fruit growing today,”

In life as in art, blue will always stay blue.

Watermedia Class Assignment #1
October 17, 2012


Materials:
coffee
gouache
ink
white, brown, sienna conte
watercolor

material list for painting with water media class

1. #12 or #10, #8, #6 round watercolor brushes, 1” Flat

Brush (the flat should be synthetic, the rounds can be natural or synthetic; watercolor brushes have
short handles);

2. Heavy weight Foamcore or Gator board larger than your paper(just tape the edges all the way around
with duct tape. Works great and very cool!)

3. Watercolor pad (sketchbook) to work out ideas

4. Several sharp #2B pencils

5. Kneaded eraser or latex eraser

6. Water container: a plastic margarine tub or other plastic jar

7. Paper towels and box of tissues

8. Watercolor palette: approximately 11 x 15”. Don’t get anything fancy or too small.

9. Watercolor paper: 1 sheets 140-lb. Arches Watercolor paper (cold-pressed). Cut your sheet in
quarters for the first class. Colors:

10. WaterColors to Start with:

Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red or Napthol Red, Cadmium, Yellow, Burnt Sienn, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ochre, Lemon Yellow, Permanent Rose

11. Other handy tools for later (optional):

Art masking fluid, Candle wax (uncolored candle), natural sponges, scraping tool, old toothbrush

colored wax sticks, pastels, Gladwrap, color pencils/crayons, cheap bristle brush, anything you have to
create texture

OTHER MATERIAL WILL BE INTRODUCED IN CLASS & ON THIS BLOG

CREATIVITY IN ACTION!

This is Dawn Trennert's workspace in the last Watercolor Workshop

WATERCOLORS BY EMIL NOLDE

WORKS BY EMIL NOLDE:  German Expressionist painted born in Schleswig (a village near Nolde), Germany. His birth name was Emil Hassen but he later changed it to Emil Nolde after the name of the town near where he grew up in.  Nolde was one of the first Expressionists and a member of famed "Die Brücke" group. He is perhaps best singled out for his heavy brushwork and dramatic use of color. Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s. He had considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style and shared viewpoints with high level Nazi officials such as Joseph Goebbels. Ironically Adolph Hitler rejected all forms of modern art as "degenerate art", and Nolde's work was officially condemned by the Nazi party. Prior to that point in time Nolde had been a highly regarded and famous artist in Germany. More then one thousand of Nolde's works were removed from German museums and some of them were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. By law he was not even permitted to paint. In personal protest he considered to do so and created hundreds of watercolors  which he titled the "Unpainted Pictures". After World War II, Nolde was reaffirmed as a great German artist and even received the German Order of Merit, Germany's highest civilian award.

Work from Watercolor Workshop Fall 2012

Work from Watercolor Workshop Fall 2012

 Jade Johnson (wash class)

Marjorie Chester (final assignment)

Dawn Trennert (wash class)

Asija Wuorenmaa (special technique class)

 

Kathryn Zupsic (wash class)

Brittany Kesler (wash class)

David Baxter (wash class)

Class work: Asija Wuorenmaa

Class work: David Baxter

Class work: Gladys Lyn Lapuz

Class work: Leena Prasad

Painting with Water Media

 I am teaching a course exploring water-media that starts next week! The class will explore a different media every week.  It's a great class to take if you want to take that next step in watercolor, or just to learn new techniques and have fun. I hope to see you in class.  ALSO, CITY COLLEGE IS EXTENDING THE EARLY-BIRD DISCOUNT PRICE OF $135!

Painting with Water Media
Class #: AR478 Register Now
The purpose of this class is to engage you in a laboratory of contemporary practice using water based media such as watercolor paint, gouache, and ink. The spontaneity and luminosity of water based material on paper is unsurpassed. You will begin to set up experiments that will lead you to your own unique visual language. Methods of critical analysis, color literacy, contemporary painting issues, and basic painting methods and skills will be introduced. There will be slide lectures, suggested exhibitions and readings, and group interaction through critiques and shared experience.
Instructor: Francesca Pastine
Cost: $150
Cost: $135 (if registered up to one week before the class begins)
Day: Wed.        # of meetings: 5
Date(s): 10/17 - 11/14
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Fort Mason, Bldg B     Rm: 203
Material fee (pay to instructor):  $10