Welcome to our archives!

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.

 

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