How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Barnyard at G and S Orchards, by Carol L. Douglas. 9X12, oil on canvas, $450, framed.

During Saturday’s class at G and S Orchards, my goal was to solidify the lesson from the prior week about painting into a monochromatic grisaille. This was something I used to do but had abandoned until I painted with Jamie WilliamsGrossman earlier this month. Then I remembered how much I enjoyed it.

Step one is a very rude value study. This gets simplified and refined with brush and rag.

One student went from his drawing right to masses of solid color. Nothing wrong with that, but I was a bit frustrated that he was totally ignoring my instructions. Eventually I realized he’d missed last week’s class because he had to sit for his SATs. But it was too late to show him on his canvas.

Step two is the addition of thin masses of color.

I quickly set up a demo for him. It was a small class so I was able to do rounds, come back and paint a bit on my canvas, call my student over to discuss what I’d done, and then repeat—over and over. I like being very busy and this was energizing. We did run over (about an hour and a half) because of this but nobody appeared to mind.

Here is Nina Koski's monochromatic painting. She was able to correct a composition problem very early on, rather than have it dogging her through the whole painting.

Meanwhile, Nina Koski had taken my instructions of last week very much to heart and was turning out quite a lovely painting of roses along the barnyard. I managed to get some intermediate photos of hers as well, so you can look at two different painters using the same technique.

Here Nina Koski is starting to add color.

Nina, by the way, painted a small plein air painting almost every day last week. She’s an exemplar of that old joke:

“Excuse me sir, but how do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

And here is her finished painting. She's only been painting a few months!

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.