Artists’ Market 2015!

Thanks to everyone who made our 13^th annual sale and show happen! It was an exciting 2 days at the end of May, 2015.

(TO SEE THE IMAGES LARGER, JUST CLICK ON THEM!)

DEMO ARTISTS

Linda Stout: The Colorful Portrait -Painting is a struggle for me. The main thing is that I always look for good composition. -She said she looks for composition first and everything falls into place…irregardless of color or shape. She painted a portrait of a young boy and broke it into three stages. She made portrait work look so easy! The crowd was very enthusiastic!

Lisa Fertig: Up North Landscape Lisa attracted a very large crowd to her demo, and moved along nicely with her painting. She uses a colored photo and then does a black and white value study. She showed the audience how she folds a page into four spaces, so that each quarter is shows so she can do her landscape placements. She said, “I work from light to dark, background to foreground, big shapes to small.” – She works from the top down mingles colors on the paper…makes shapes instead of lines for the trees, the shorelines, the rocks. She uses a credit card to cut more branches into her painting.

Gail Speckman: The 3 Powerful Elements of Landscape: Shape, Line and Texture – I like to express energy, bring out what is intriguing and appealing. I also like to get myself into trouble because that is when I am fully engaged. – She handed out texture techniques, 10 examples per page, with lots of ideas for the audience to look at. She painted wet into wet, and has written a book about that. She also showed a black and white photo sketch as well as a rainbow colored sketch to do before painting.

Dick Graves: CityScape Dick started his demo by explaining how he saves his used water in a bottle. The pigments settle to the bottom and he ends up with colors mixed from lots of paint! He wets his paper and then proceeded to whiz on colors, in large brush strokes. He put in the people with a square brush, using the side of that brush for fine lines. He uses water sprays to lessen strong colors or to move light off the page. His painting took about an hour to come to conclusion…he was extremely entertaining and he had one of the biggest crowds observing his demo. He also had more completed paintings around in the demo area than any other artist!

Linda Lawrence: Fun and Creative Watercolors Linda is president of Artists del Norte and has an extensive background in painting. She uses tissues and fabrics, loves to paint scarves. She brought a floral with most of the flowers painted and ready to go and proceeded to put in the background colors for us. She is a very deliberate painter and loves doing negatives in backgrounds.

Karen Knutson: How I get ideas for my paintings – I use two L-shaped “framers” to look for simple shapes in magazine pictures and ads. – Then I sketch the shapes always connecting the lights. – My favorite thing is to create “little abbies” (abstracts) this way. Karen is also posing with Diane Lee, who was the Demo Chair person…she lined up all the demo artists for the show!

David Smith “Misty Mountain ” techniques – David drew a HUGE crowd for his demo. He paints on wet paper but uses the hair dryer to really dry areas he is working upon. He does three layers for his paintings….Background, mid-range, then final details. He has fun tools that he uses: Materpieces of the past, is an old painting cut into a rough edge which he uses to daub onto the new painting from that rough edge! A tiny sponge that he has torn up to help him apply tree branches and foilage; he also loves the Mr Clean sponge to take out color. He was almost done with his painting, when someone asked how he would put birches into it. He proceeded to cut up masking tape to make the birch trees, used the Mr Clean sponge to erase the painting inside the trees, down to white, and then painted in two glorious birch trees. At the start of his demo, he had the audience members draw numbers out of a bag….and at the end he drew a number and that lucky person WON his demo painting. As it turned out, he had an additional painting on the back so that lucky winner got two David Smith paintings as her prize!

ARTISTS AT WORK

We had several groups of artists gather together to just paint on Friday and Saturday. Several who paint together on a regular basis got together and showed the guests what and how they paint. Some just painted, some tried new techniques, and others just talked to patrons coming through. A good time by any criteria! Photos show various groups who participated! Thanks to all of them!