Plein Air Painting Workshop

I recently taught a Plein Air Painting Workshop at the shop. If you aren’t familiar with Plein Air, it’s basically a french phrase that means painting outside and experiencing the creation of work outside of your studio walls. Our original plan was to paint at our local park. We have a beautiful bridge and the landscape surrounding it is gorgeous. Of course, the weather had other ideas, and heavy thunderstorms were on their way, so we had to roll with plan “B”.

We were able to bring our easels outside, and grab some sketches, and reference shots from the pond and naturalized landscape behind the store.

After that, we headed in to dive into our paints. We first started utilizing the technique of underpainting, and then we built our paintings with layers of paint from there. I love being able to work in acrylics such as when I made this abstract piece.

 

What I really loved was that my workshop participants really didn’t need much guidance, so I was able to paint and create a long side of them, which doesn’t happen very often.

We had four hours of classical music, nibbles, and sips. I  opened the window, and we listened to the falling rain while we painted. It felt very relaxing and almost magical.

The best part was, we all started with the exact same inspiration, and somewhere along the way, our paintings took on a life of there own. Everyone ended up with something completely beautiful… and different. I think that’s what made them even more beautiful!

My painting was a conglomeration of my first and second reference photos. I love how the rocks turned out, but I would love to rework my trees slightly. I would like the bigger tree to have a more “airy” quality to it. Overall though, I love it. I am super happy with how the pond and lily pads turned out.

 

The Plein Air Painting Workshop was so fun and relaxing! We have a few other upcoming workshops if you want to jump in and create!

 

You can visit our site here to check out the workshops.