Tanya Bone Workshop

I was recently in Vancouver for a weekend workshop with the extremely talented Tanya Bone. It was a fabulously inspiring weekend and Tanya was a very attentive and giving instructor. If you ever have a chance to take a class from her I would highly recommend it. She specializes in still life and was teaching how to paint in a painterly manner. I learned so much about edges and brushstrokes. I have a tons of tips and techniques to now try to put into practice.

Tanya likes to be up close and personal with her set up. She spends a lot of time getting her set up and the lighting just right before she begins. 

One of the things I found the most difficult but that is definitely one of the beautiful aspects in Tanya's paintings, is the loose textured background she does, suggesting foliage and different light patterns. She paints it with a fan brush and transparent colours. Watching her it seems like it would be easy but I felt like I'd never painted before. I wiped my canvas so many times! Other participants were on their second and third painting and I was still wiping!

Here is a detail of the beginnings of the vessel she was demonstrating. She also demonstrated painting the gold edge on the vessel which again was a build up of layers on transparent paint until she got to final layer which was the highlight mixed with white. It was magic!

Tea and Tonic  8 x 10

I went home and spent a two sessions slowly working through the techniques she taught and ended with this first attempt at a more painterly style. It is SO HARD to paint loosely like this! I'm going to keep working on small pieces trying to blend my style of painting with the techniques I've learned from Tanya, and hope to create my own painterly style. 

Tanya Bone Workshop

Mike Svob Workshop - More

  

This is my second painting in Mike Svob's workshop. This one is in oils, and I was trying to use a colour scheme I don't usually go for. I'm more of a warm palette person. I'd like to try this one again with a warm palette and more intensity to the colours. Below is the reference photo

The second day of the workshop Mike painted in oils. The process was a little different but the concept was the same. We chose a reference or references, created 5 or 6 thumbnails trying different emphasis and compositions.  This is really hard to do and requires a lot of practice to come up with many different scenarios of the same image. Mike just whips them off and has endless ideas. The most important part is breaking the thumbnail into three values - light, midtone, and dark, then paint from the thumbnail instead of the reference, using any colour, as long as it's the same value as the value field in the thumbnail. this process creates a new vision from your reference material. In fact you could paint several paintings from the same reference this way. I'm so excited to practice this new approach and see where it leads me.

Mike Svob Workshop - More