Water Ways in Oil

 Connecting to Paint Party Friday, FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Enjoy all the artist displaying their art this week on Paint Party Friday.

A sunny and warmer than we have had lately in Chicagoland.

This is an oil painting on a piece of canvas.  I did this while learning different water effects from Susan Ploughe.  I think I need a little more "umph" in the distant sky, but otherwise I like it.

Click on image to enlarge for detail.

Water Ways

Oil on canvas

8 x 10

Gloria J Zucaro's, Susan Ploughe's "Waterways" Workshop

     I posted so lte last week so am posting this again to Paint Party Friday this week.
This week I took Susan Ploughe’s three day workshop called “Waterways”.   If you are a member of The Venice Art Center in Venice Florida, you have a treat in store!  I understand Susan Ploughe will doing a workshop soon in your location.

In our workshop we went through written information, photos of various types of water and paintings by other artist of lakes, streams, waterfalls, the ocean, reflections and still clear waters.  Susan also did a short demo for each type before we began our own paintings.  She printed out four or five examples for us to pick from and to use as references. In the three days we did six paintings each.  It was not important that you finished a whole painting but that you tried out the technique that helped the viewer recognize the type of water setting you were trying to describe.

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I always enjoy Susan’s workshops because she makes learning and improving my skills both fun and inspiring.  She makes me feel that I am getting better, and shows me alternative ways to get there.  I like the fact that if I am not understanding a certain concept she will pull out an extra surface and demonstrate what she was advocating.  She will not paint on your canvas unless she asks you first, and always suggests that you change it afterward to your own stroke, so that it is “all yours”.  Susan is a nationally awarded painter with The Oil Painters of America and has paintings exhibited in galleries and in magazine articles.  We are so lucky to have her teaching classes and workshops on a regular basis at the Mainstreet Art Centre in Lake Zurich, IL.   You can see Susan Ploughe’s website at  http://susanploughe.com/

I will be posting to Paint Party Friday(late!), Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

My waterfall study done from a copyright free photo

12" x 9" oil on canvas board.

My Waves Study from a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky

12" x 9" oil on canvas board

My Calm Shallow Water Study from copyright free photo

9" x 12" oil on canvas board

My Reflections Study from Copyright Free Photo

8" x 10" on canvas sheet

My Shadows, Ripples, Reflections Study from Copyright Free Photo

8" x 10" oil on canvas sheet

My Mountain/Lake Reflections Study

8" x 10" oil on canvas sheet

Have a great week.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gloria

Gloria J Zucaro's "The New Mainstreet"

We moved into the new Mainstreet Art Centre this week after Frankie Johnson and her husband Jay spent months doing carpentry. They along with Dave Haley made new taborets, shelving for fabric and still life pieces, displays for paintings, 8 foot long tables on wheels for easy movement for workshops, storage for frames and palettes.  And of course, painting the walls.  And meanwhile, classes went on in our old location.  At night and on weekends, Frankie and some students and teachers and her family members would move things not directly essential to each class over to the new location.  As the full move-over got closer, she started with some kids classes, and the Wednesday evening watercolor class by having them start in the new building.  We are so thankful for all the hard work everyone did to give us this great new space.  We now have our wash sinks, refrigerator for cold drinks and palette storage, upstairs instead of in the basement.  We have two bathrooms and three classrooms.  So if you are in our area, come and join us for classes or workshops from excellent instructors locally and from around the USA!

Our front entry and chairs for having a cup of "Joe", tea, pop, or water.

 The coffee station and microwave.............>

 Still life props,  beginning student and charcoal area, fabric, easels, taborets............... and the table where we have lunch(and goodies!)
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                                                    Storage for our long sleeve, short sleeve and sweat shirts 

 Our wash sinks & storage

                                                                      Frame storage

 Art magazines for people who would like references on how the experts do it and photos of animals, birds, boats, people etc. for learning about drawing shapes.
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                                   Kid's Classroom 3..............>

 Storage in Classroom 3

                                                                 Back entry hall and aprons to borrow for keeping clean.

Susan Ploughe (Amazing instructor & Amazing Artist) conferring with a student before class. 











Monday morning student working on a pastel.

Our heroine, Kathy who runs the front desk, keeps the coffee pot going, plays music for us, frames our paintings, schedules classes, takes our money (cheerfully! :> ) and just does anything we need.  Kathy is also an expert palette knife painter and pastelist.

Classroom 2
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And saving the best for last, Frankie Johnson!

here is a link to her Fine Art             http://frankiejohnsonartstudio.com/works

Gloria J Zucaro's "Blorange"

My painting today is for Jennifer Mclean s' The Artist Playroom.  The theme of the suggested challenge is to paint something predominately in blue and orange.  One of our participants in these challenges is Tracey Fletcher King and these two complimentary colors are her favorites.  I chose to paint an orange on a blue plate.  It is very impressionist and loose...why, because I was testing out a new app on my IPod Touch 5 that my son and his wife gave me for Christmas.  It is called Art Rage.  It is a drawing/painting app.  You can choose your tools, your supports and your palette of colors.  This is my first attempt using it, and it was somewhat of a struggle in control on a small screen.  I think I need a stylus or whatever you call the tool you use instead of your fingers .  I also don't know how to get my paintings done in the app to my regular camera roll on the Touch, so couldn't email it to myself.  I took a picture of it with my regular camera and put it into Adobe Elements 9 to try to "fix" the distortion from taking it off the screen surface.  I was introduced to this app by Susan Ploughe who has done several studies with it on her IPad and will use them for future paintings.  Now if I could only figure out how to save it to my camera roll.  I tried the three finger tap on the screen, and the two finger tap, but can't find any button to send it to my email.  Help!

Gloria J Zucaro's "Golden Opportunity"

This my entry for Paint Party Friday, a weekly display from about 85 artists from all over the globe.  The site is hosted by Kristin and Eva,  Thank you, Ladies!
My painting today has undergone many changes.  I first painted it about 4 years ago.  I had all cornstalks in the background, and a very dark black shadow under the crow and all strokes on the pumpkin going one way, and a stem bottom showing on the pumpkin towards the right side of the canvas.  On Monday of this week Susan Ploughe who is one of the instructors at Mainstreet Art Center (where I go to paint with my artists friends a couple of times a week) asked us to all bring in a couple of our "duds", the paintings that did not work out as planned.  So I took my crow and pumpkin.  It was predominately orange and yellow over the whole painting, the pumpkin, the ground, the background of cornstalks.  There was some green in the leaves and some of the cornstalks, but otherwise all orange & yellow!  Susan had a sneaky idea up her sleeve!  She had us trade our paintings with someone else and we were each to work on the other person's painting, so that the painting would be looked at with a new perspective.  Susan told us that if we didn't like what the other person did with our painting we could just wipe it off with turp, since all our paintings were dry long ago.  Well, I worked on Corrine's Napa Valley painting and she worked on my crow.  Corrine merged all the cornstalks together with some different background colors that were impressionistic, and the painting was so much better, but it was still oranges, yellows and greens.  After I went home, I thought about it and decided that blue might be good with the orange, since they are compliments.  So today I changed the shape of the pumpkin, changed the direction of the strokes on the pumpkin, lightened the really dark shadow, as suggested by Ann Feldman, added many different colors to the leaves, made the broken piece of pumpkin shell the right value, and got rid of all the orange in the background with sky blue.  Oh, what a relief it is! ( I am singing this part!) LOL!

11"H x 14"W Original Oil on Stretched Canvas