Whether you are traveling, exploring, or just adventuring through your daily life, draw the things that are important to you and start noticing the small details around you. Learn to create illustrated art journals on paper, with drawings in pen and watercolors.
Say goodbye to flat and boring painting as you learn to create patterns of light and dark in watercolor. Through demonstrations and hands-on exercises, you’ll gain confidence in creating these contrasting elements which add magic, excitement, and drama to your work.
Lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on experimentation introduce the medium of oils. Working from museum masterpieces, still-life arrangements or your own favorite photos, explore basic painting techniques, including color-mixing, scumbling, and glazing to gain the technical background and experience you need to get started as a painter.
Explore your relationship to individual colors and how they connect to many facets of your life. Practice simple and playful acrylic painting techniques incorporating all the colors of the spectrum, plus black and white. Then, begin to record personal stories in a journal to use everyday.
Explore the traditional French academic painting techniques from the 17th to 18th centuries. Learn technical secrets and gain insight into how artists such as Jean Dominique Ingres, Jacque-Louis David, William-Adolphe Bougereau, and Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun achieved their signature effects. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)
Beginning students as well as experienced painters explore new materials and techniques in watercolor painting.
Learn how to paint expressive portraits as you improve your observational skills, the ability to see angles and shapes, and your understanding of color and value. The class emphasizes how to define a subject’s unique features by determining shapes of light and shadow.
Use flowing watercolors to create a poinsettia that blooms all year. Learn how to quickly draw a poinsettia or trace one. Finish the class with a watercolor poinsettia to give as a gift, or use the image to make prints for cards.
Quickly capture your travels with loose lines and painterly colors with the quick-sketch watercolors method. This technique is perfect for studies, travel journals, and finished fine art.
Virtually escape to Tuscany by drawing poppies with flowing organic lines, then painting the scene with mingling colors. Add interest by painting an old stone wall or sun-dappled trees. Create drama with light and shadow.
