Our presenter will be Frankye Oliver, a wonderful Waco watercolorist we weally wanted. (I couldn't wesist that wascally word warp ala Elmer Fudd.) She will share some things she picked up in a Ted Nuttall workshop she attended recently in San Antonio. But then, she was already wonderful. Two of her paintings shown here are now hanging in the Arboretum in the Central Texas Watercolor Society exhibit. Maybe you can drop by and see them, as well as other fine paintings. The one at the right won the People's Choice Award! Click on it and you can see better just how good it is.

 

We will meet at our usual time and place, Waco Charter School, 615 N 25th Street, with refreshments and conversation at 1:30, and the demonstration  shortly after the meeting begins at 2:00. Bring a work to share with us Show and Tell, and bring friends. First time visitors are free.

Frankye is an accomplished watercolorist and a member of the Central Texas Watercolor Society. She attended the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and had a career in fashion drawing. She has won many awards in local and regional exhibits, and will have a solo exhibit at the Arboretum in July. She shared several quotes from artists that inspired her. Among them was this one from Ted Nuttall: "There is no better place to be than in the middle of a painting."

Frankye began her demo with a drawing of a young girl drinking from a teacup already drawn on a quarter sheet of 300 lb hot press watercolor paper. She had transferred the image from a photo by rubbing some pencil graphite on the back of the photo and tracing over the major lines. She then completed the drawing, referring to the photo, and lightened it with a kneaded eraser. (Darkened here to show up better.)

 

She painted with a Rafael 8404 Kalinsky sable brush (which she had found online at a bargain price of $200!), as well as a smaller sable brush. Her palette consisted of the following paints: Cad orange by American Journey (Cheap Joe's); Cad red light and mineral violet by Holbein; and cad yellow, alizerin crimson, scarlet lake, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, Hooker's green, sap green, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, and yellow ochre by Windsor Newton. For her working palette she used a smooth plastic tray with a lip. She mixed a skin color from cad red, raw sienna and a little cad yellow. She started by applying the lightest flesh tones to the dry paper with a dilute mixture of the skin color.

 

She added shading while the paint dried using a darker hue of the same flesh tones. For the hair, she used cad yellow and raw sienna in a very wet wash, putting down the lightest color first, then darkening the shaded areas with the same color and some raw sienna. She then went back to the flesh tones, adding darker tones to define areas, but keeping soft light tones throughout the painting since the subject was a young child. She emphasized thinking about the form of the face as a sculptor would, paying attention to which features come forward, and which recede. She created soft edges for shadows on the form of the subject, and harder edges for cast shadows. She worked on the blue eyes of the subject, emphasizing them through shading and judicious use of color.

Frankye continued to develop the shading while we took a break for Show and Tell, further defining the hair, eyes, and facial features. For the teacup, she used very light shades of ultramarine and cobalt blue to suggest the roundness and smoothness of the cup. For the background she used the same mixture of blues, applied somewhat diagonally across the page in an irregular pattern, with the darkest hue providing a contrast to lighten the yellow hair. She used cad orange to gray the blue background so it would blend better with the painting as a whole. After it dried, she painted green stripes on the dress as a contrast to the blues and yellows used earlier. Frankye will finish the painting at home and share the final version with us to use here.

 

Many thanks to Frankye for a great demo. Thanks also to Gloria Meadows, Karen Groman, Charleen Isbell, Linda Green, Judy Franklin, and Deanie Chastain for bringing refreshments, and to all those who brought works for Show and Tell, some of which are shown below. Also, Gloria Meadows showed us photographs of her new homey chicken coop.

 

Show and Tell:

 

                                       

Nancy Cagle     Deanie Chastain     Judy Franklin       Karen Groman   Christine Niekamp