Painting from the Intuitive - Session I

I am so excited to be brining longer art classes to the studio to expand our offerings of subjects.  I am teaching a five week art course titled Painting from the Intuitive loosely based off of a course I took with artist Patricia Wheeler at Penland School of Crafts

 

You can read about my week at 'Adult Art Camp' as I dubbed it on my blog on www.MarquinDesigns.com 

 

For this course, I have given students four 12 x 12 square birch boxes with sides that are about 2 inches deep to work on.

We started the class by adding spackling (the stuff you use to cover nail holes) to the surface. 

You will want to wear latex gloves and use a variety of spatulas, palette knives, and plastic knives to apply the spackling to the surface to create different textures. 

You will also want to cover the sides and top of the surface completely with the spackling. 

These ladies worked hard making interesting surface texture

 

Once the surface had been 'frosted' the crew experimented with adding flecks of dried tea to the spackling.  Some of the leaves will stay, but some will be sanded off of the surface next week when we take sandpaper to the box.  Ultimately, the leaves just add a bit of interesting texture. 

Next, I instructed students to pour wax from a candle (my most favorite scent of all time, Votivo Red Currant) to the surface.  Adding wax to a painting adds a different texture and can also make it ever-so-slightly scented for a while. 

Adding wax to the surface

Vincent, the art studio cat, taking in the hard work (and trying to decide if he should walk across the surfaces!) 

Our last step was adding just a little bit of watered down paint to the surfaces of the birch boxes.  I let the students paint, splatter, and drip the paint for visual interest. 

This is the full recap of Week I - Painting from the Intuitive.  

The Full Materials List from Week I: (click material to see what I used) 
Birch Box
Painters Spackling
Palette Knife
Dried Tea
Votivo Candle
Acrylic Paint 
Latex Gloves
I hope this gets your creative juices flowing and you give it a whirl at your house.

 

 

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