Marc Hanson workshop: Day 1

A beautiful Spring day, perfect for a painting workshop! We began the day...well, after the torturous drive through Nashville rush hour traffic to get to OnTrack Studio in Franklin...on the covered porch with Marc Hanson talking with all of us about his favorite supplies and discoveries. He generously shared his thoughts about brushes, supports, and miscellaneous tidbits (such as: Utrecht brand titanium white stays more fluid than other brands in cold weather.) He embraces a humble attitude when it comes to the tools of painting, having found that $4 brushes (Simply Simmons) work just as well as the high end brushes for much of the lay-in of a painting and a sun-shield from Walmart is handy for shading a canvas. He stores his many palette knives in the $3 plastic brush holder from Hobby Lobby. Gotta love the practicality!

His demonstration painting took us right to the heart of the day's lesson...to get the composition and values correct at the start.  #colorgetsalltheglorybutvaluedoesallthework  Dividing a large canvas into 4 sections, he painted one light-valued scene, one middle-value scene, one dark-value scene, and one final scene evenly weighted with all 3 values.

When a painting is done with the correct values, it will "read" beautifully even in shades of gray. Here is Marc's demo done in the late afternoon on Day 1:

value study demo by Marc Hanson

THIS IS NOT MY PAINTING!! 

The reason it looks so fabulous is that it is the work of a Master... who was teaching all of us passionate students how to create something beautiful.


Tomorrow (Day 2) we will be allowed to play with color. That will be in the next blog post. Thanks for reading!!

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