My best trick for starting a painting, figure drawing, class recaps
This month I’ll share the strategy Kate Rado and I taught our gouache students for starting a painting, and catch you up on the events I’ve been running.
We had a magical weekend at this year’s Art Jam!
Stick around through the end of the newsletter to hear about workshops you could take and see an extra special photo of my cat, Ruby.
As one of the organizing members of the Spooky Haus, Art Jam is my biggest event of the year. I am so proud to be a part of creating this space for art, sharing, and trans joy.
My fellow organizers are Lior Ayalon and Miriam Levenson. This year was our 4th Art Jam, and we have learned so much about putting together a successful event and asking for help and volunteers. We were fortunate enough to have my favorite photographer, Kayleigh Shawn, to document the event. To find out more about the co-op, check out our website and follow us on social media.
One of our long time Art Jam attendees, Ray Gonzalez, led a lino block printing workshop at Art Jam. Their innovative opening exercise about positive and negative space unlocked the art form for the attendees.
Ray will be teaching their lino workshop at ARCH Supplies in April, so make sure to sign up while there’s still space!
Coming up much sooner at ARCH, my friend Neil G. Ballard is teaching Drawing Comics on Saturday, March 22. In this workshop, Neil will show students how to compose images for comics based on tried-and-true comics-making techniques such as spot-blacking and drawing from reference mannequins.
Speaking of workshops, I have been hard at work with Kate Rado preparing for our sold out gouache workshop. We had a fantastic first day of class, so I wanted to share the still life samples we made together, and my favorite peice of wisdom about starting a painting: thumbnails. Thumbnails are a way to try multiple compositions before committing to one for the whole painting. They give you space to explore and warm up, helping you move beyond your first idea and explore the possibilities. Kate and I made these samples together:
You can see that we then developed a select few of the thumbnails into value studies. This approach helped our students take the painting one step at a time by considering composition and value structure first, then moving on to color mixing and paint application. Showing both of our samples helped them see two different artists’ approaches and that there is no one right answer.
Several of the attendees said that the thumbnail process was a new approach that helped them see the painting process differently.
In the midst of organizing all these classes, I am still holding it down every week at Madrone Art Bar. Every Tuesday I host figure drawing with Sketchboard. Being there every week helps me keep up a consistent practice even when I’m busy.
My other regular event, CROONERS, may not be for drawing, but it is for music lovers, creatives, and cocktail enthusiasts. I talk often about how wonderful the show is (and it really is), but this month I wanted to call out our fantastic bartender, MK, pictured here wearing pink knife earrings from Spooky Haus. They make the cocktails with care and panache, and they even time the shaker to the music and applause.
Every month, CROONERS is an opportunity to take a moment to celebrate queer voices, listen to beautiful music, and appreciate our community. It’s so important to carve out these spaces and support queer arts, so join us this month on March 23 at 7 or 9pm at Stookey’s Blue Room.
Side note: I designed this new poster for the show!
Thank you for joining me for another month! While you await the next newsletter, you can check out my website to see my portfolio of plein air paintings, still lifes, block prints, figure drawings, tiny scale model houses, murals, and you can also find information on commissions! Please feel welcome to email me and ask about any ideas you have that aren’t covered on my commission page, I’m always willing to discuss.
Stay tuned for next month, and let me know what you’d like to hear about in the newsletter in the future.
This time we have an extra special portrait of Ruby from none other than Kayleigh Shawn!
Thank you!
-Nathaniel J. Bice
he/him