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Welcome to our archives!
April 5 - Cheryle Chapline - Watercolors
 Cheryle
Chapline, who teaches art at TSTC, will create a watercolor for
us, demonstrating
underpainting,
glazing, and application of local color to achieve an image of her view
of the subject matter. Cheryle's use of color, value, and detail to
produce a believable image is truly amazing. A couple of examples are
shown here. You can see a lot more at the Carleen Bright Arboretum,
where her work is now on display.
But
be sure to come and see her at work. We
will
meet on Sunday, April 5, at our usual time and place, the Waco Charter
School, 615 N 25th Street, at 1:30 for refreshments and conversation,
with the meeting and demo at 2. Bring friends. The first visit is free,
or they can join for the rest of the year for only $14. Also bring a
painting for the monthly contest.
April 5 - Cheryle Chapline - Watercolor Portrait
Cheryle
is a watercolorist and an instructor at TSTC. She emphasized the
importance of drawing, rather than tracing or projecting an image onto
the paper, although these techniques can sometimes be appropriate. She
suggested sketching real scenes when you have time to spare, if only a
sketch
of
your own hand or foot. Inverting the sketch helps in seeing the shapes,
especially the negative shapes that are important to the image, but are
often overlooked by beginners. At left, Cheryle is adding masking fluid
to her sketch. At right is the sketch with masked highlights.
She
shared many of the techniques she employs to achieve her spectacular
effects. She is skilled at mixing colors to get natural looking greens
in her florals. She doesn't usually paint with greens right out of the
tube, getting a larger range of colors and also some unity by mixing
blues and yellows. Paintings gain depth by having darker and brighter
greens in the foreground, and bluer or grayer ones in the background. At
right is one of her color mixing charts, which help her get the colors
she wants.
She
uses Ken Hosmer's technique of creating dark and light paths through the
painting. She emphasized that a good painting uses a full value range
from light to dark. She suggested several ways we could test our work
for appropriate values, including drawing a value study, and making a
black & white Xerox copy of the painting to check the values. She also
suggested using the "rule of thirds" when planning our work. This is
done by imagining a tic tac toe board and putting points of interest
where
the lines intersect. Varying the size of objects and adding diagonals
also make work more interesting. She suggested using the largest brushes
possible to avoid tiny brush strokes. She loves natural hair brushes,
but has found that some synthetics are now very good. For the demo she
used large synthetics from the Lowel-Corning 7700 series. She passed
around several examples of how she uses a photograph as a reference,
then creates a value study and a pencil drawing before she puts the
paint on .
 Starting
with two similar drawings of her son, she showed two ways of painting.
One was to apply Pebo, a masking fluid, with a pipette from a medical
lab to preserve highlights. After it dried she created an underpainting
using aurelian yellow (upper left), cobalt blue
(upper right), and permanent rose (lower left). She put the yellow on
first, then the blue for shadows and blue areas, and finally red,
layering and mixing the colors until the desired color is attained in
each area of the painting. At the lower right is the final underpainting
before the masking fluid has been removed. She uses two brushes, one to
lay on the paint and a second clean, damp one to create soft edges where
she wanted them.
 The
masking fluid can be picked up with a rubber cement eraser when it is
fully dry. With the masking removed, Cheryle blended the colors and
moves some into the masked area with a short, stiff, scrubber or
scumbler brush. If this removes all of the
hard edges, she adds a few back later. At the upper left, she is working
on the lips; at the lower left, the eyes. At right is the state of the
painting when time ran out.
The
other method was one she learned at a Janet Rogers workshop. She mixed
aurelian yellow, cobalt blue, and permanent rose right on the paper,
pulling paint into the lighter areas. To stop a bloom from forming, one
can use a very dry brush
to lift the dark paint into the light, or put thicker paint into the
bloom. For the final layer of paint, she uses a large variety of colors
on her
palette. Among them are Windsor red, burnt sienna, burnt orange, burnt
umber, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, thalo green, gold ochre, cobalt
turquoise, ultramarine blue, raw sienna, and cobalt violet.
Many thanks to
Cheryle, who is
an inspired and skillful painter, giving us many suggestions that we can
try in our work. Thanks also to Rose Jacobson, Charleen Isbell, LaTralle
Carroll, Judy Franklin, Don Magid, and Ellen Foster, who brought
refreshments, and to all of those who brought art to be voted on for use
on the postcard for our May 13 exhibit at the Arboretum. Examples of
these are shown below. Bill Franklin's landscape was chosen for the post
card.

Nancy
Cagle LaTralle Carroll
Bill Franklin
Judy Franklin
Larry Garza

Linda Green
Charleen Isbell Rose Jacobson Violet Piper
Bobbee Watts
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