I'd like to keep a selection of my demos from teaching to share online. I'll start with this small black box still life I put together the other day. This July I will be teaching a refreshed version of my Digital Observational Painting course through PCA&D. I am adding a bit more of a focus on drawing and two dimensional design. Usually I skip quickly through drawing, since I teach painting, but drawing issues will always haunt your piece if you don't correct them during the process of painting. I want to focus the students' attention on design as a main source of expression in their work. Our paintings shouldn't all look the same, even when working from the same motif. We will go through a series of exercises intended to open up a conversation about what our goal is in making a painting, or how our visual marks can tell the story of our visual attention.
Course description for my upcoming Digital Observational Painting:
Making a painting is a practice of both drawing and painting skills, but also one of design. While it is a visual problem to solve, there is not one correct answer, but an entire language of expression. This course will open a conversation into digital painting strategies and tools to grapple with the expressive challenge of visual perception. What are our paintings about and how can we make them visually legible? We actively guide our perception of the still life motif to focus around a design question, because while there are infinite ways to paint a still life, the correct visual path is the one that furthers and engages with our initial design question.