Just a short train ride from Chicago artists can fly and ride to the beautiful walkable city of Red Wing on the Mississippi River.
Learn to Paint the Air or Atmosphere using Tonalism:
Painting the air that envelops something, rather than just the light, sets tonalistic paintings apart from all other painting styles. Tonalism is to art like Jazz is to music — a purely American invention by American artists from 1880-1920. Join the renewal of this uniquely American art form.
This two-day workshop focuses on the color theory behind tonalism. By learning specific aspects of color theory, artists using any style of painting can use this information to better control the outcomes of their chosen field of painting, or use the information to explore tonalism.
Not sure what the differences are between, hue, color, tint, tone, shade, value, saturation, chroma, warmth, coolness, and zones are….. then this definitely will be the workshop for you.
We will open the day with a quick set of hands-on exercises to explore the above names associated with color theory. Once everyone understands the color nomenclature we will focus on color exercises, and then work on individual paintings using the tonalist approach.
Regardless of your style of painting, or preferred genre of subjects, this workshop gives you tools to grow your understanding of color even if you never intend to paint in a tonalist style afterward. In other words: knowledge you can take home with you.
Class information:
May 24, 9 am-4 pm & May 25, 9 am-2:30 pm
Teaching artist: Avon Waters
Level: Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced
Age: 18+
Class size: 5-12
Participation fee: $295
Art Medium: Painting
All mediums welcome. The instructor will be using pastel but the principles apply to all color painting mediums.
Bring your own supplies for whatever your medium, including:
Reference photos, or drawings to paint from, or bring an old painting to paint from (not over). Experience has shown the using photos from a cell phone doesn’t work well. Please either print off the photos or plan to use a tablet and know how to keep the images from timing out.
Gray Scale — suggestion only, Dick Blicks gray scale and value finder is great #04947-2500
Some scrap canvas, paper, or support for your chosen medium for exercises
At least 1-2 substrates for a finished painting
Artist Bio: “I paint the air around a thing more than focusing on the thing itself. My work walks the knife's edge between abstraction and representationalism. I am fortunate to live around and in natural areas. Shapes of unspoiled nature have fascinated me since my childhood; running around the woods and fields of my rural upbringing. I am at home with the trees, rocks, rivers and streams. My bold use of color represents my emotional response to a subject.”
Avon Waters works in pastel, oil, charcoal, and mixed media. As seen in Plein Air Magazine, Avon instructs art workshops across the nation and demonstrates wet pastel techniques and mixed media to pastel societies by invitation.
His work also appears in various museums and galleries across the nation as part of national and International juried pastel competitions. He writes about art and its connection to conservation in magazines like “Outdoor America,” and Plein Air Magazine’s blog The Outdoor Painter.
He is a past president of IPAPA, Indiana Plein Air Painters Association, and has won awards in the Red Wing Plein Air festivals multiple years.
You can view his work at https://www.avonwaters.com/ or https://www.youtube.com/@PastelWithAvon