Come see my show in Xenia, Ohio

The Xenia Area Community Theater (X*ACT) asked me to be their visiting artist for the holiday season. I just got home from hanging fifteen of my favorite paintings. It will be up until January 2. I was half-way home before I realized that I forgot to photograph the display. I'll head back this weekend and shoot some pictures to show you.

Prize Winning Iris

Iris #2 (c) Susan Bertke

My watercolor painting "Iris #2" won an Honorable Mention in the Fairborn Art Association's Members' Choice contest at the May meeting. Given the quality of the paintings that were submitted by the members, this was a real ego boost for me.

Exploring Acrylics, Class #3

Rose of Sharon #1 (c) Susan Bertke 2013

Tuesday was #3 in my Exploring Acrylics class at Fairborn Art Association. We explored the use of acrylics as transparent watercolor. Most of my students had only minimal previous exposure to watercolors. The idea of dropping color into a wet background and letting it flow was definitely a new technique for them. They also got a taste of negative painting in the leafy area. 

The past couple of months have been really busy for me, art-wise!

One of the paintings I did in
Joe Fettingis' workshop

• I joined the Fairborn Art Association last year, and the members have been very helpful and encouraging. Through the FAA I signed up to do an acrylic demo on April 10 in Xenia, Ohio, at the Greene County Council On Aging Senior Creativity Expo. It was a great experience, and I hope to support them in future expos.
• Last week, I attended a 3-day workshop with Joe Fettingis, NWS, at the FAA gallery in Fairborn, Ohio. If you have an opportunity to go to one of his workshops, I heartily recommend it.
• I submitted three paintings to the FAA's annual members show. (Sadly, I didn't win any awards.)
• Starting next week I'll be teaching an 8-week class called "Exploring Acrylics" at the FAA gallery on Tuesday afternoons (May 21 thru July 9). So I've been preparing for that.
• AND I've been working on a large commissioned painting for a friend.

So if I haven't been keeping up with my blog, I hope you'll understand!

Exploring Acrylics

Acrylics over watercolor

I will be teaching an 8-week acrylics class on Tuesday afternoons (1:00-4:00 p.m.) from May 21 to July 9, 2013, at the Fairborn Art Association gallery located at the rear of Fairborn Senior Apartment Building, 221 N. Central Ave, Fairborn, Ohio. The cost of the 8-week class is $85.

The class will focus on the sheer versatility of acrylics, with each week exploring a different subject, application technique, and/or support. Just a few of the possibilities:

  

SUPPORTS: canvas, paper, cardboard, illustration or mat board…
 
TECHNIQUES: glazing, impasto, scumbling, drybrush, wet-in-wet, collage, blending, painting with a knife…

SUBJECTS: portraiture, animals, landscape, floral, still life, abstracts…

MULTIMEDIA TECHNIQUES:

• Acrylic as an under-painting for oils, pastels, pencils…
• Acrylic as an over-painting for watercolors or India Ink
• Collage...

Actual projects may be tailored to the previous experience and interests of the students.

See more of my artwork at:  http://www.fairbornart.com/content/bertke-susan 
http://www.facebook.com/susanbertke  

To receive a registration form or for more information, comment on this blog and leave your e-mail address.

A Face Only a Wife Could Love

"Horny B*stard" (c) Susan Bertke
graphite pencil on paper

   Shortly after we were married, I told my husband a joke. He returned from his next business trip with this little guy.

   The joke: There was an kindergarten teacher who was doing a lesson for her inner city kids about animals. She'd hold up a picture of an animal, and the kids would shout out the name of the animal. They identified cats, dogs, mice, pigeons, even horses. Then the teacher held up a picture of a white-tailed deer with a magnificent rack of antlers. That stumped them.
   "I'll give you a hint," she said. "Imagine your dad comes home from work, and he greets your mom with a big kiss. What does she call him?"
   Puzzled, one little boy looked at his friend and whispered, "Do you supposed that's a horny b*stard?"
  
   So now I have my very own blue-furred horny b*stard. Ugly or not, I love him.

Landscape Doodle

   This year I've spent a lot of time cooling my heels in doctors' waiting rooms, so I decided to make productive use of the time and took along a sketch book. Generally, I'm not confident drawing without a subject in front of me, so I started doodling landscape elements: rocks, grass, trees...and this is what I ended up with.
    This was done with a Pilot Precise V5 pen and a green Pilot Razor Point. 

Home Repairs

Version 1

All those drunken windows and the tilting foundation and tower were just more than I could stand. So I got out my tool box and went to work. Neither would get me a job in an architectural firm, but I hope you agree that version #2 is an improvement.

Version 2

P.S. The different color balance is from different lighting conditions. Neither is an exact match to the original.

Christmas in October

Yesterday, one of my students was working on a painting for this year's Christmas card. I had that in mind today when I dug through my "morgue" and found a house I'd photographed years ago. (Sorry, I don't remember where it's located.) Anyway, I changed the season to winter, hung some bows and a wreath on windows and door, et voila! It was fun, and I got it done in an afternoon.

I'm reasonably happy with it. Or at least I thought I was. Now, as I stare at it on my screen, I see a blue million little flaws. Maybe I can claim the builder was a little bit drunk on this job?

"Christmas Card House", about 10x10 inches, watercolor on 140# Lanaquarelle.

Paint the Forest, Not the Trees

This is an exercise in "negative painting." I started by painting the entire surface with yellow ochre. Then I painted around the foreground trees with Pthalo blue. Then I painted around the next layer of trees with more blue. Repeat. The idea is that you never actually paint the trees themselves--only the spaces around them. Yeah, I know. Clear as mud!

Actually, the trick is to avoid mud. The more different pigments used, the muddier the color becomes. (See my previous comments about the petals of flowers.) So I stuck to Pthalo blue until the very last, darkest layer, where I used Daniel Smith Blue Apatite Genuine.

The other challenge in this exercise is compositional: there is a tendency to have "cookie cutter trees" that are uniformly spaced, sized and/or slanted, which is not good. So each time I paint around a tree, I have to make sure that it is different from the trees on either side of it. Each tree is an individual, not a clone. Not as easy as it sounds, believe me.

I'll use this as a demo painting for this afternoon's class.

When you don't have fresh flowers, use silk!

I needed a quick "model" for a demo in my Tuesday watercolor class in Kettering, so I grabbed my digital camera and shot a dozen macro pictures of silk flowers I had on hand. I liked this shot the best. I didn't take a lot of pains with the drawing (obviously) because my students were primarily interested in figuring out how to make petals look 3D and how to not get "lost" in all those petals. Still, I think the resulting painting came out pretty well...

For any students out there, this was a limited palette painting. I used quinacridone red and permanent alizarin crimson (both pigment PV19) for the petals. The background is a mixture of quinacridone red and pthalo green just slopped on very loosely. Background petals were "desaturated" with just a TINY bit of pthalo green. There is a little bit of negative painting here and there at the bottom. The yellow center was added with Naples yellow and American Journey Sour Lemon.
If you have trouble keeping the color of your flower petals bright and clean, try to avoid mixing two or more different pigments together. It's very easy to unintentionally include a neutralizer in the mix. For example, if I'd mixed a red-orange with alizarin crimson, the slight blue cast in the alizarin would have dulled the red-orange a bit, and vice versa (blue and orange are opposites on the color wheel and neutralize each other).
Now, if I really wanted to make this daisy a bit more orange, the way to do it would be to paint an underpainting of yellow, dry it completely, and then paint red over it. The yellow glows through the red, and the result is gorgeous. (Yes, this means you have to think ahead. LOL)

Cascade

Here is the finished version of "Cascade." As you can see, it's come a long way since the underpainting was done.

"Cascade" (c) Susan Bertke 2011

Rocks! Waterfall! (Work in progress)

     Now that I've had my floral break, I'm back to working on another rocks and waterfall painting. This one is a conglomerate of two shots I took somewhere out west -- Yellowstone, maybe. It's about half done, and I'm chipping away at it during the Tuesday afternoon watercolor class I teach in Kettering, Ohio.
     I started this with the intention of doing a pen and ink drawing, then over-painting with watercolor. That idea lasted through the first session, and you can see evidence of this beginning in a couple sections. During the second session, I laid in the sky and distant background. Last Tuesday I worked on the rocks on the middle and lower right, and I started indicating the flow of the water.
     If you're interested in technique, you can see where I've used coarse table salt in the rocks on the lower right. It gives some interesting texture, though I'll probably paint over some of it. It would look too odd to have it only in that one section of the painting.
     Keep watching this blog, and you'll see how the painting develops.

Red Daylilies

Being heartily tired of rocks and waterfalls, I decided to do a floral. Here's my attempt to capture the brilliance of my husband's red daylilies.
It's transparent watercolor on an eighth sheet of Arches hot press watercolor paper.

Rocky Stream: Finished!

"Rocky Stream" c2011 Susan Bertke

After spending an afternoon fiddling with the little details, I've declared this painting finished! 

Unlike the other paintings I've been working on the last couple of months, this one is pure transparent watercolor. The technique has been heavy on dry brushing to get textures and shadows. That's a very careful, tedious way to keep control of watercolor. Except for the very first wash, there was very little wet-into-wet painting in this one.

I've finally identified the reference photo as one I took from the back of a motel just outside of Yosemite National Bank. 

Give me your comments!

Stream: Work in Progress #2

     I've been fiddling with this painting since I posted the first stage in September. If you compare the two, you'll see that I've added another layer of shadow on many of the foreground rocks. I've also given more definition to the trees on the left and added softer definition to the more distant trees on the top right.
     Unlike the previous two paintings, this work is pure transparent watercolor, since I'm using it as a demo painting for my Tuesday afternoon watercolor class in Kettering. I'm in no hurry to finish, and I think it's about 85% there. I mostly want to work in the lower left quarter. The little bit of white water needs to be detailed, and some fine detail added to the rocks immediately around it.
     Anyone see anything else I should do to it? Comments welcome!

Cedar Falls -- Completed?



Cedar Falls (c) 2011 Susan Bertke

 You saw the beginning stages of this watercolor on September 2nd. I think it's finally finished. (Or as "finished" was my paintings ever are. The longer they sit around my studio, the more likely I am to go back and fiddle with them.)

That dadgum waterfall has been driving me crazy since my last post. I can't tell you how many variations I've painted. Watercolor purists maintain that the only white in the painting should be the original white of the paper. Early on, it became clear that this would not be a pure transparent watercolor. I ended up overworking fairly extensively with gouache (opaque watercolor).

The trick to combining transparent and opaque watercolor is to do so in a way that seems intentional. It should look like the opaque bits were intended from the beginning, not desperate attempts to cover up mistakes. Since I took Chris Leeper's workshop, I've been a lot more relaxed about the idea of mixing watercolor with either acrylic or gouache. It's helped my transparent work, I think, because I'm a lot more relaxed in the beginning stages of a painting. I think, "Oh, I can be a little more adventurous about my colors, because I can always use this as an underpainting if I don't like the result."

The finished size is about 14"x20" on Arches 140-lb. watercolor paper.

Braided Stream



Braided Stream (c) 2011 Susan Bertke

 Here's the completed version of "Braided Stream." (If you look at my previous post, you'll see the underpainting.)

The background hills gave me the most grief in this painting. I vowed I was going to keep them a bit out of focus so the center of interest would stay in the foreground. But I went back to make "just a few corrections," and the next thing I knew I was painting individual branches on trees! So then I had to go back and paint over most of that detail. :-)

I'm happy with the texture I got in the foreground, especially all the gravel and stones. And the bark of the trees came out nice, too. The really tricky part was the water, or rather showing the mud and stones under the surface of the water.

The painting is done in acrylic on Arches 140-lb. watercolor paper, 14"x20".

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Braided Stream - Work in Progress

I started this painting during the Brown Bagger session last Monday and haven't done a thing with it since then. It's acrylic on paper, and definitely is just the beginning step. Watch here for future progress...

"Summer Woods"

"Summer Woods" by Susan Bertke (c) 2011

When I started this painting at the first Brown Bagger session at Rosewood Art Centre, I shocked everyone by working on an Arches watercolor block instead of a canvas. Coming from a watercolor background, it seemed perfectly normal to me! I see several advantages to working on a good quality rag paper:

• I'm not crazy about the woven texture of canvas, especially when I'm working with thin glazes. And watercolor paper comes in three different finishes (hot-press, cold-press, and rough).
• It gives me the option of starting the painting with watercolor or acrylic thinned to the consistency of watercolor -- which gives a transparency and luminosity that I haven't achieved with opaque media.
• I have more framing options:

1. Under glass with a mat (I'm not sure that having the glass in direct contact with the acrylic paint would be a good idea.) in a standard frame (not necessarily a canvas-deep frame).
2. Framed with neither glass nor mat, so it looks more like a canvas work. 
3. Dry-mounted to a support of some sort and hung without any frame at all. (I haven't tried this, but I'm sure someone has.) Chris Leeper actually mounts his paper to a board before he starts working.

That said, I have had one problem with working this way: for some reason acrylic washes seem to soak into the blank paper more than watercolor does. I can't imagine why this is so, but that's my experience. It's not a problem if I start with watercolor washes, or if I thoroughly pre-wet the paper.  So maybe I'm simply not using enough water in my acrylic washes. I also know that some artists prime their watercolor paper with gesso, gouache, or matte medium. Any of these would cut down on the absorbency of the paper.
Anyway, this painting is acrylic on Arches 140-lb cold-press watercolor paper, 14" x 20".