March Newsletter

March 2008

To: Plein Air Georgia Members
From: Phyllis Franklin in Thomaston, Georgia

I have great news. Jim Greenwood of Acworth, Georgia has agreed to manage and keep PAG on line and serve as a board member. Thank you so much Jim. I know I hear applause and cheers from everyone. Thank you too to BJ Wright and Jo Adang who have agreed to stay on as editors and advisory board members. I too will stay on as an advisory board member to lend support to Jim.

Look for a letter from Jim soon telling you of plans he has for 2008. Also look for a membership invoice to come to you. When you get this invoice, just follow the instructions given to you by the Pay Pal folks. Your support moving PAG forward is so appreciated.

You do not have to become a member of PAG to participate in most events but by becoming a member you will show your support for the organization, its mission and activities. We also provide a Yahoo discussion group which will alert you event news via email and encourage you to join at your earliest convenience. Go to www.yahoo.com and select groups, enter the name Plein Air Georgia in the group search box and that will give you a box to click and join. Joining the discussion group is not mandatory but just nice if you want to receive news via email.

It is an honor to be a member of PAG. At Plein Air Georgia, we have no preference as to style, materials used, or artistic interpretation. These are all personal choices that contribute to the unique expression of each artist while they paint 'en plein air'. Likewise, we think honest work by novice or professional is equally valid. The challenges and rewards of plein air painting are open to all. Although many of us are not die-hard plein air purist, we all enjoy painting outside and enjoy networking with fellow artists who enjoy the same. Some of us claim the title of plein air artists and others just enjoy the occasional outing. No matter how much or how little you are able to get outside and paint, all painters and patrons alike are welcome as members of PAG.

Join us for Workshops- paintouts- forum discussions, friendship
There is always something new to learn to push us beyond our comfort zone. Our mission is to serve the membership by providing a means to communicate with each other, share event and workshop information and provide a showcase for our work

To join, send an email to pleinairga@yahoo.com requesting membership. An invoice will be sent to you. Please provide us with the following:

Name - Email address
Website URL if you have one
Short Biography or artist statement
Physical location – town – county -Local art organization
Three or four images of your work in jpg or gif format along with art size, title and medium.

We are excited to have you as a member us no matter if you join with full membership or just join the Yahoo discussion Group. If you would like to become a contributing editor or serve on the advisory board for your area with post capabilities to the news blog, which feeds into the PAG web, let us know and we can set that up for you. Web membership is not required to be a news correspondent nor is membership at the Yahoo discussion group. What is important is being able to stay informed so we don't miss an event, resource or opportunity that takes place somewhere members might like to attend. If you have questions, just send a message to pleinairga@yahoo.com and that will reach the PAG staff.

Jo Adang
Phyllis Franklin
Jim Greenwood
BJ Wright

November Colors

The colors outside are finally showing in some spots around my neighborhood and I'm anxious to get out and paint but don't think thats going to happen anytime soon. I'm making good progress with my knee and all the other stuff going on.

Test results for anemia are encouraging as this new med pack is doing it's job and I finished up yesterday with a very painful physical therapy session for my knee that has bursitis. Once this bursitis goes away, I hope I NEVER have another attack. It's the same knee that had the broken patella a couple of years ago. I'm going to do everything possible to keep my knee healthy for sure. At least now I can walk a bit, sit a bit and get some things done like the ton of clothes piled up in my laundry room. Today I'm going to walk to the mailbox and see how that goes. If that works, I'm going to get myself out to the studio tomorrow. I also hope that I'll be able to sit at the computer and share some art things I've been reading.

I miss keeping the girls more than I thought I would. Strange how life makes it's twists and turns and all the things you though you knew about yourself change. Some pleasent and some not so.

Hope you all are going well.

Jack the Koi

The end of August and the sky is overcast with the promise of rain. The goldfish in the pond pretend they are koi as they splash their fins in and out of the cool morning waters. When we are children it’s fun to play dress up and prance around like the princesses that our mother’s tell us we are. It’s good to watch the fish playing and remember the play times when we were transported from everyday life into a fantasy world. What is it they say? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Jack the Koi
En plein air 08-31-07
8x10 framed without mat
Soft Pastel on Canson
Framed & ready to hang
$100.00

Contact phyllisfranklin@hotmail for availability








Click any image to see an enlarged view.

Colored Pastel Paper

This morning I woke up early, before dawn, and got myself together for the day. As soon as it was light enough I went out in the yard to the goldfish pond and sat with my pastel pencils and some dusty red canson paper taped to a slick masonite board. I watched for a bit as the fish played around catching the early morning bugs. I guess everyone was waking up and wanting breakfast. The birds were singing and the frogs had gone silent I suppose in fear I would see them.

The fish in the pond are just ordinary goldfish, but one has a fancy tail and I guess that makes him special. I call him Jack. As I sat thinking and drawing I thought about the paintings I had looked at the night before of wonderful koi swimming in a pool. Jack had all the moves of a koi, but just wasn't a big and he was just orange all over, not spotted like some koi are, but like I said he had the spirit of koi. So, I pretended he was a koi just like pretend when I was a little girl and wanted to be a princess. Before my hour was up I had finished my work and felt really good about the painting, so I hurred to get it under glass and framed.

The Canson paper I used was a dusty red color so I just blocked in Jack letting the paper show thru. Working on a red background and letting the background pop thru everyonce in a while is a good thing to bring harmony to a painting. Keeping your colors limited is another way to bring harmony. I put down a dark blue layer around Jack and then proceeded to layer in yellows and some greens over the dark blue which produced different shades of green all the way across. To finish the painting up, I used a cerulean blue pastel which worked well with the red paper.

Normally you frame pastels using a mat and spacers to keep the paper from touching the glass, but you can frame pastels next to the glass if you are sure you have the paper secure so it will not rub or shuffle at any time. I took care to tape the Canson paper with archival tape to an archival backing board and then framed next to the glass. Yes, you lose some of the sparkle, but in this case, framing next to the glass actually helped the illusion of Jack in the water.

Jack the Koi
En plein air 08-31-07
8x10 framed without mat
Soft Pastel on Canson
Framed & ready to hang
$100.00
Contact phyllisfranklin@hotmail for availability

Painting with Pastels

Click any image to see an enlarged view.

Yesterday I painted with pastels and took some progress images along the way. Here they are:




First I sketched in the ducks using Derwent pastel pencils and started placing in the negavtive shapes around the ducks trying to leave the white of the paper as much as I thought would be good to have in the water and leaving the ducks completely white. I did get some blue into the ducks, but at this point it was like a very light wash, so it didn't matter much. For this painting I was glad that I had white Wallis sanded paper because I think it helped the water sparkle and also helped speed the painting of the ducks. I haven't painted with my pastels in quite some time and was surprised when I found white paper because most of the time I use the Belgian Mist, professional sheets. Sheet size for this one is 18" × 24" and I've taped the paper to a full sheet of foam core with blue painters tape. For the first few swipes of pastel and water as I wanted to be able to take it off the foam core if I needed to. I wasn't sure how wet I would get the paper and wanted to be able to dry the back with a hair dryer if I did get it too wet. Fortunately, working quickly worked for me and the paper did not get too wet or buckle a bit. I did not pad the paper with newspaper like I do sometime. Padding with newspaper helps me not get so heavy with my strokes for some reason. I tend to fill up the tooth really quickly because I do have a heavy hand. Wallis paper is touted to be able to take 25 layers, but they didn't use my hands to do the test. :)



Then I used some water and a sponge brush to make the blue pastel liquid and sink into the paper. I did this quickly and with as few brush strokes as I could manage and still get the flow of the water like I wanted it to be. I confess, some of the water helped create a water effect without my help. :)

Note: You can use water, denatured alcohol, Gamsol which is 100% pure odorless mineral spirits or Turpenoid as a wetting agent to turn the pastel into a kind of liquid. I've tried all of the above and have found that using Gamsol as the wetting agent seems to hold the colors better.



Adding in the shadows for the duck feathers was lots of fun, along with adding in the oranges for feet, beak, and a little on the feathers just to keep them from being too clean. :) Pastels, as any other media reflect color from the first colors put on the support as well as the support color itself. The colors you first put down might not be visiable in the end result, but are very important because of their reflective nature and color mixing effects.




More refining and headed for the last touches of sunshine. I've used a very limited palette of ultramarine blue, cad orange, burnt sienna, and a few greys. This makes it easier for me not to make muddy areas and certainly sets this painting up as a very effective complementary color study.



Done.

I used Rembrant soft pastels and Derwent pastel pencils with a final touch of a white pastel from my own collection of handmade pastels I made several years ago. I did not put this painting on my easel but rather propped it up on the counter and used some newspaper to catch the dust. I did this on purpose so I could lay the painting down on the counter or prop against the table or hold in my hand to sketch and work with the strokes for the ducks. While I layed in the water, I did move the painting around to let the pastel move with the water I applied to liquify the pastel and set it into the paper much like you would a watercolor wash.

Final image is 23x17 unless I crop a bit, and I don't think I will.

Critique from Elin Pendleton

Nice, Phyllis! You've handled the reflections well. The critique for improvement would be to get the water beyond the duck heads to "lay down" more by the addition of some burnt umber to the blues, and perhaps lighten them a bit (lighter, bluer, grayer with distance).


Your whites on the ducks seem very cold to me, so perhaps an addition of a whisper of either cad orange or cad yellow medium to the lightest parts would warm up the sunlit sides.

Painting Children - More tips

I recieved another set of tips for painting children so I thought I'd share them here:

1. Don't paint babies if what you want is THEIR portrait. They don't have their personality yet so wait until they develop one. Babies almost always look like any other baby.

2. If you shoot photos outside in the sunshine, don't shoot them at midday because it will give you dark shadows under their noses and rings under their eyes.

3. If you are shooting photos for reference have them dressed in clothes they normally wear. You don't want an uncomfortable child. Let them pose for you if they are posers but try to use the photos you take that are natural poses. Give them their favorite toy, pet or let them play with something new you've brought along.

What to do with an ugly painting

I’m sure that most of us have paintings that fall into the categories of good, bad and ugly. I’m finding that to have a painting that I really think is better than good tends to run the course of about one out of three. So that leaves me with at least one painting in the bad or ugly category and I have to decide what to do with it.

The first thing I remind myself is that all art is a great experiment. I don’t care how long you have been painting or how accomplished you are, each time you create a work of art, you are experimenting and each experiment will turn out differently. Have you ever tried to paint the same painting? Did it turn out the same? Some of us have track records that turn out successful paintings all the time, but even if you are this kind of artist, you are still a student for we all learn every day from each painting we do.

The second thing I remind myself of is that an old ugly painting doesn’t have to go to the landfill gallery unless I just give up and I shouldn’t give up without trying to save it at least one time. There are some things that can help me make a clean start or work-over my painting that I’ve used successfully before so I run down my list and see if I can salvage my painting by using one of these (choose the one that fit your medium).

· Spray it with oven cleaner and take off all the old oil paint
· Sand the oil or acrylic paint off and reapply gesso
· Cut it up and use it in a collage
· Soak the paper in a tub of water and rub pigment off gently with hands
· Cut the canvas or paper into strips to be used as bookmarks
· Use a product called sansodor which is a W&N solvent for oils
· Try reapplying a sanded surface when working with pastel papers
· Crop the ugly parts and reframe
. Take the canvas off and save the stretcher bars for new canvas
· Turn it into an abstract
· Flip it and paint a different painting with the old painting as a ground
· Try glazing
· Turn it into a mixed medium painting using inks, casein, egg tempera or gouache

I’m sure that you could add more ways. Make your own list and the next time to are ready to make a donation to the landfill, remember you can try one of the things on your list to save that painting. If all else fails and you don’t want to try anything new, you can go ahead and make that trash donation and still call yourself successful because you have just cleaned and organized your studio.