Renée

Bill Teitsworth, AWS, NWS

Woodloch

watercolor on Fabriano paper
21" X 20"
October, 2011

At left, one of three versions of the lake at Woodloch Sanctuary,
in Hawley, PA, where we taught a weekend watercolor workshop
in October. In each of the three versions, 90% of my
painting time was committed to the complicated foreground.
A passage like that, with hundreds of individual strokes, does
take time, but there's really no other way to arrive at that
complex but organized look.

And stay tuned for Sketchbook Confidential II, coming
in June, 2012!

Ameilie in Summer

watercolor on Aquabee wet-media sketch paper
12" X 9"
November, 2011

Check out the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of "The Artist's Magazine,"
(on sale now at your local bookseller), with Maureen Bloomfield's
wonderful article on "Painting Snow"...with me, Stephen Quiller,
William Hosner, Colleen Howe, and T. Allen Lawson.

Includes "Sundown, Gardner Road," (below).

East Gloucester, at right, watercolor on Fabriano paper, was done during a recent painting trip to Cape Ann. Renee and I did some drawings of the harbor from Rocky Neck, then worked from the drawings. (The weather prevented us actually doing the painting outdoors!) Despite the added step of working away from the site, I think the feeling of working from life comes through in this larger work.

East Gloucester

watercolor on Fabriano paper
30" X 22"
June 2011

Demo: Red Tulips

watercolor on Fabriano paper
15" X 22"

Saturday, May 7th 2011

A bunch of lush red tulips, a few sprays of forsythia, and a favorite old junk-shop vase...what more could you want? I set out to illustrate the power of a simple approach, so I chose a limited palette of Winsor blue, Winsor yellow, and quinacridone red, plus a little cadmium scarlet and thalo yellow-green. But the greatest part of the painting was done with just the "high-key palette" of the Winsor blue, yellow, and red. Even the "neutral" gray of the vase is done with the three primaries, painted wet-in-wet.

Our subject was made for this kind of treatment. But even with a more complicated subject it's a lot of fun, and a good learning experience, to occasionally try limiting your palette this way.

Incidentally, the flecks and accents of white paper, whose purpose was really to separate wet areas of paint in this quick study, serve nicely as "graphic accents," and contribute to whatever freshness and sparkle "Red Tulips" posesses!

This subject is near to me both physically (just across town and a quick right on Gardner Road), emotionally, and every other way. Renee and I have often walked over these fields with our dog Honey, winter and summer. I have this subject in my bones, so to speak, so I don't need a lot of reference material to begin to say something about it...just a so-so photograph for Sundown on Gardner Road, or as in the case of Solstice, below, just memory and a few pencil notations.

Sundown, Gardner Road

acrylic on ragboard
6" X 8"
March 10, 2011

Blue Daisy

acrylic on ragboard
16" X 14"
January 23, 2011

Our model, who has a superb flair for style, showed up yesterday with her hair pinned back with a big plastic barrette. Perfect! This little sketch took a total of 30 minutes...two 15-minute blocks at the end of our session. It's unfinished, of course, and has plenty of rough spots and some minor errors, but it also has that quality of "life" that is what I'm looking for whenever I paint. Sunday, January 23rd, 2011.

The two "Gardner Road" images, at right and below, right, illustrate a working procedure that I not only recommend to my students, but that I actually use myself. As a watermedia artist, I'm committed to the idea of taking risks, but at the same time I like to improve the odds any time I can. I know that if I can make my design look good at a small scale, in black and white, it has a better chance of looking good in color. The accepted wisdom, the very best wisdom, advises us to make more than one of the little b/w thumbnails...one of them, as Frank Webb says, will stand out as being superior.

Study #2 for "Gardner Road"

acrylic on ragboard
7" X 9"
January 2011

Solstice

acrylic on ragboard
4" X 5"
2011

Study for "Gardner Road"

permanent marker on sketch paper
3" X 4"
2011

The genesis of this image (The Bridge, at right) goes all the way back to the marker drawing of March 31st, reproduced below. (You have to scroll way down to see it!) After the marker drawing, I did a color rough, and then this version. I have a long association with the city of Scranton, and this image conveys a certain feeling I have for the city...for its history, its architecture, and its people. I hope that feeling, or at least a feeling, comes through.

The Bridge

acrylic on Arches paper
20" X 19"
2010

Lucia Beach

acrylic on ragboard
September, 2010

The sketchbook page below was the raw material for "Boat Yard, Spruce Head," at right. The sketch was done on the spot; this is the first of several variations. If you use your imagination, you'll see that the right half of the sketch contains most of the information that found its way into the painting.

Study for "Boat Yard"
permanent marker on Strathmore sketch paper
5" X 8"

Boat Yard, Spruce Head

acrylic on ragboard
September, 2010

Lake Shore in August

acrylic on ragboard
8 1/2" X 7"
Lacawac Sanctuary, August 19, 2010

At left, the lake at Lacawac Sanctuary, looking East from the old flagstone pier. This view is a sort of "Motif #1" for our annual watercolor workshop at Lacawac (thank you to all of our wonderful, motivated painters!), and we've seen it and painted it in all weathers. The on-the-spot sketchbook study for the painting is below:

Value Study
Watercolor on sketch paper, 5" X 4 1/2"

Arts Alive!

Demo: "Flag Donut"

At right, a demonstration painting for the Arts Alive group, at ArtWorks Gallery and Studio in Scranton. The Arts Alive painters were with us all month, and they are a lively bunch, talented and motivated. My demo was about "conditions of lighting," and orchestrating and scaling values to support, in this case, the final touch: the glossy highlights on the donut. A classic Boston cream, of course.

Flag Donut (demo)

acrylic on ragboard
12" X 9"

Daylilies (demo)

watercolor on Saunders Waterford paper

15" X 22"
July 24, 2010

There's a long flower border in the front of our house, on the bank of the gully where Bear Brook runs between us and the road. This melon-colored daylily is a focal point for most of July. The study (The Long Border, below) was painted right on the spot.

* * *

At left, another view of the same subject, done as a class demo. Two teaching points: first, the interplay of warm and cool color to convey the effect of sunlight; and second, the development of pattern in the background and subordinate areas by painting between the lights.

Shadow Rebecca

acrylic on board
8" X 8"

July 7, 2010

The Long Border

acrylic on board
9" X 5"
July 10, 2010

The Last of the Foxgloves

acrylic on board
8" X 7"
July 4, 2010

One last attempt, for this year anyway, to do justice to the foxgloves. About now they're fading, and all the lower florets are dropping off. Sometimes you see one fall with a bumblebee in it
---the weight of the bee finally too much for the spent blossom. The foxgloves seed themselves widely, and pop up in unexpected places, but they're welcome wherever they come.

So, just a quick sketch...a tiny poem dedicated to the Impressionists, to sunshine and colored shadows, and to the beauty...might even say the "prettiness"... of pink flowers in the sun.

For the watercolorist, the white of the paper is an extremely valuable commodity, with several different uses...as a color ("white"), as the lightest light or highlight, and a variation of this last, as a "graphic accent," to separate objects in the foreground from the plane or planes behind them. I demonstrated the graphic accent in "Foxgloves," at right, for our class on Saturday. Sometimes, for me at least, compositional problems go undetected during a demonstration, especially if composition isn't the main issue. I've put "Foxgloves" up just as is, as proof once again that nobody's perfect.

Foxgloves (demo)

watercolor on Fabriano paper
15" X 11"
June 26, 2010

Two Pines, Spring

acrylic on ragboard
8" X 9"
May 10, 2010

At left, and below, a miniature "suite" of Spring paintings. Sometimes on a day like today (when Two Pines was painted) you can look at the sky and see it exactly as Pissaro saw it. We try, as my friend Serge Hollerbach might say, to bear witness to our time. Time, season, mood...color, light, and space...the raw materials of the painter.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Red Tulips

acryiic on ragboard
9" X 12"
May 5, 2010

From the Bridge

permanent marker on sketch paper
5" X 8"

March 21, 2010

The permanent marker (the well-known "Magic Marker") is one of my top four favorite sketch mediums. You can see the other three in my article for The Artist's Magazine, November 2008, "Four to Go." For an in-depth look at my way of using permanent markers on my sketch outings, click on the link below:

http://www.artistsnetwork.com/article/teitsworth-markers/

"Painting People"

Two days: Saturday and Sunday,

March 27 & 28, 2010

Rehoboth Art League
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware

Contact:

Kim Klabe, Education Director

302 227-8408
education@rehobothartleague.org

Claire with Earring

acrylic on ragboard
20" X 16"
March 15, 2010

Sugarbush

acrylic on linen
8" X 10"
March 14, 2010

Sugarbush, at left, is a study of a wide strip of woodland between the MacLain's big hayfield, and what used to be a pasture behind their cow barn. Beyond the pasture is an even bigger strip of woods, and another hayfield, with wild woods, the real thing, beyond all of it. Harry and Alan tap the maple trees, and boil the sap into maple syrup. In fact they're cooking right now in "Harry's Maple Works."

Renee and I walk here with our dog, Honey, in all seasons...the best way to become really familiar with your landscape.

Some of the images below are thumbnails. Click to see a larger view, and don't forget to click the "back" arrow on your browser to return to this page!

For the watermedia artist, "landscape season" is over once your paint water starts to freeze. Now with Spring coming, landscape season is coming around again, and warm-up exercises like these sky studies (below and at right) make sense to me. Even though I'm interested in the sky, I try to make all the pieces work together. Now I'm interested in how to make trees come against the sky in a believable way.

High Summer

acrylic on linen
8" X 10"
March 5, 2010

Sky at MacLain Farm

acrylic on ragboard
10" X 12"

March 1, 2010

Periodically I get interested in skies, what my mentor Betty Lou Schlemm used to call "...the soul of the landscape." It's an interesting challenge to try to get it right, that huge arching dome, and make it really feel like a sky. We shall see. Sky at MacLain Farm, at left.

So, at right is the second version of my demo. Still using that cropped full-sheet format. Same palette, same value-plan. Just taking it to the next level, and pushing the image to see where it leads. At the "thumbnail" size you can see that for sheer impact, the earlier, simpler version has a slight edge. But at the larger size, or "normal viewing distance," the elaboration of the second image starts to work.

This is the image-making process!

Pennsylvania Nocturne

watercolor on Arches paper
22" X 28"
(Second version of demo)
Feb 24-26, 2010

Last of the Light

watercolor on Arches paper
22" X 28"
Demo, February 20, 2010

There are two other versions of Last of the Light (left): one in my sketchbook, and a small "color rough" done in acrylics. This version was a demo for our class today, so there are one or two problems with it, but still, I must say, this is very close to what I want to say about this subject.

The point of the demo was to show the power of a greatly simplified value-scale. Just three widely-separated values: a light near the white of the paper, a dark near black, and that shadowed blue almost exactly between the two.

In the two demos, at right and below, I was exploring different aspects of painting snow. Of course, in watercolor you paint everything else but the "snow," which is usually untouched white paper.

In the one at right, I really overstated that blue for the shadows...a move that gave me the leeway to put a lot of strength in the sky. The combination of the brilliant white of the paper, the bold blue shadows, and the blustery sky really conveys, for me, the feel of the day...after the storm.

After the Storm

watercolor on Fabriano paper
22" X 15"

Demo, January 23, 2010

Foreground Shadows

watercolor on Fabriano paper
24" X 18"

Demo, January 9, 2010

China Delight

watermedia on ragboard
36" X 27"
2009
The 143rd Annual International Exhibition,
The American Watercolor Society,
at The Salmagundi Club in New York
April 6th-May 2nd, 2010

Claire with Flowers
(hommage a Bonnard)

acrylic on ragboard
8" X 7"
2010

At left, "inspired by the masters"...in this case, a double-barreled investigation into Bonnard's color and his wonderful, quirky sense of composition. An exercise like this is fun to try occasionally, and is a great way to map out interesting new directions.

December 15, 2009

White Still-life

watercolor on Fabriano paper
22" X 30"

Demo, December 4th

The companion piece to Black Still-life. Here the "forms" are carved out of the untouched white paper by the midtone washes. The rough, raw quality doesn't bother me...it was a demo, after all...but I may have gone overboard in selecting "unpretty" subject matter. Still, our students definitely got the point, and they did a fabulous job!

Saturday class, December 4th, 2009

November 24th, 2009. At right, a short pose from our sketch group...trying out the new batch of Domestic Etching paper.

Claire, Tuesday 11/24

pastel on Domestic Etching
26" X 20"

Black Still-life (demo)

watercolor on Fabriano paper

26" X 22"
Bill Teitsworth, NWS
November 2009

At left, a demo from our class today, November 21st. It was great fun to do, and I hope that sense of enjoyment comes through!

Fenceline, acrylic on linen, below, can be seen until the end of November at the National Arts Club, Gramercy Park South, NYC, in the Allied Artists of America annual.

Study for "Fenceline"

Permanent marker on sketch paper
Drawing Board
The Artist's Magazine, June 2009

For web-exclusive tips on value-contrast in
drawing, go to:

http://www.artistsnetwork.com/article/value-contrast-technique

Winged Being

watercolor on Arches paper
30" X 22"

Civic Ballet of Scranton Art/Dance Collaboration





You'll be able to see one of the pencil studies for Early Morning, Bullshead, at right, in my article for the "Drawing Board" department of The Artist's Magazine, October 2008...on newstands or in your mailbox on September 9th.	Early Morning, Bullshead watercolor and acrylic on Arches paper 22" X 30" 2008
Arcturus watercolor on Arches paper 15" X 11" 2008	Blue Island watercolor on Fabriano paper 30" X 22" Courtesy of Kiesendahl and Calhoun Fine Art, Ltd.