Peninsula School of Art Workshops!

Door County is one of my Favorite Locations to paint. Door County is the 'thumb' of Wisconsin, the Peninsula of land that is surrounded by Green Bay to the west and Lake Michigan to the East. The light in Door County is prismatic, and the weather is very dramatic. Those conditions make for some memorable painting experiences!

I have two adult workshops scheduled at the Peninsula School of Art in 2019. I have been teaching painting workshops in Door County, at the Peninsula School, since 2012. Both of my classes offered this year will be two days, which is the perfect amount of time to learn the concepts that I will teach.

I will supply some special tools for the class, that will help you to compose the landscape in it's simplest forms, and then build on top of the simple structure with striking outdoor color. Everything that I teach is easy concepts, one skill leads to the next. Learning to paint does not have to be a huge ordeal, I think that you will see that I have a lot of fun when I paint, and that I keep it simple.

No matter what stage of painter you are, it is always the best idea to constantly practice the fundamentals. In this class we will have some great lessons that will help you with your drawing skills. We will make thumbnail marker sketches, so that you can learn to compose your paintings according to the values that you perceive. And finally, you will learn how to mix your colors, according to specific values using my special 'value palette'.

The Painting Light Indoor and out will start out in the studio on the first day. We will make thumbnail sketches and create paintings of a lamp-lit still life. On the second day, we will take our paints outdoors, and create some paintings en plein air. We will work the same way as in the studio, taking time to create greyscale marker sketches, and matching our paint mixtures to specific values.

In the Barns Workshop, we will spend our time outdoors painting the historic Barns of Door County! In this class, we will focus on the fundamentals of good drawing skills, and composing with marker sketches. The best part of this class is that you will learn to paint the light illuminating the landscape.

I hope to see you this summer at the Peninsula School of Art!

A Greyscale Marker Values Sketch, and the still life painting that it informed. We will create marker sketches before we paint, which will help us to get the light into our paintings.

This is the Uncropped Painting for the promotional image above. This is a very graphic painting, it is nature simplified to it's basic elements. The trees are simply shapes of shadows and light, and the ground is only some swatches of colors. The more that I paint, the more that I am interested in keeping it simple and graphic. 

This is the other uncropped image, from the promotional materials above. In this piece, I underpainted the fields with a warm orange color, and then put the greens of the field on top, leaving much of the orange showing. This broken color technique gives the feeling of outdoor color.