Summer Workshop Schedule

I'll be teaching two workshops this summer. Both workshops are open to all levels and will focus on learning to see light and color through hands on work. The first one is a 3 day workshop in Colorado hosted by Terry Ludwig Pastels in Littleton, south of Denver. The dates for that workshop are June 8-10, and the price is $325. We will be exploring the range of views available in this beautiful part of the country from rivers to mountains. There will be a combination of lectures, demos, and one on one instruction. Will we be looking at atmospheric color and light? Yes! Water and boulders will most likely be involved, but we'll deal with the landscape as it comes upon us. I'll be handling the registration and payment for this one so please email me at moraga97@yahoo.com to sign up. I accept payment through check or paypal.





The other workshop is a return to the Sierra Nevada Field Campus on July 15-20 in the Sierra Buttes region on the west side of the Yuba pass. This will be the third season I have taught there, and we are still finding new views to paint among the many lakes and rivers in this area. To sign up and get more information go to the field campus website

Fun with the Figure

After a long period of ignoring the opportunities and discipline of figure work, I've started attending a weekly long pose group on Tuesday evenings. The pose is 3 hours. I forget how much fun it is to work with others in a studio environment. In some ways it is much more contemplative than working outdoors. Music is playing, the lighting is stable, you can see how others are handling the pose, which can be inspiring and instructive. The figure presents a wonderful set of challenges to explore... edges, temperature, subtle value shifts, clothing patterns, hair... really a laundry list of things to observe and use as a 'recipe' of sorts in your own work. I'm also learning how much my drawing needed this. I am really out of practice on proportion, and end up re-working a fair amount to get various body parts to all fit together. When I'm painting a tree or shrub, you can move a lot of elements around to suit the composition, but it doesn't work that way with the figure, at least for me. I dive in, then I find around the end of the second pose, I'm doing a lot of repair work.


This is one week of a 2 week pose. It was actually a 3 week pose, but I started over the second week to make the figure larger by cropping in, so I could get a better chance to work on the head with my chunky pastels. This is where I miss the paint brushes, but I'm still having fun. Both pieces are on Canson paper around 18 x 24.