Paint Sites - Special Activities

The view Dick painted

In April SCVWS member Dick Zunkel gave a plein air demo at Los Gatos Plaza Park. Dick uses pen and ink, and juicy watercolor to create loose, dynamic paintings. His fast, and lively approach is perfect for plein air painting where time is of the essence to capture the scene in front of you.

Dick likes to paint on Kilimanjaro 300 lb paper from Cheap Joes. Dick's advice is to use lots of water and let it, and the paint, do most of the work for you. He likes to use a vignette style having plenty of white paper in and around his painting.

About the inks Dick comments:
The high quality low cost ink I use is "Dux" brand for less than $1.57 for 50 ml at Soyodo, 1245 Mountain View Alviso Rd., Sunnyvale.  Soyodo sells various Chinese products including brush painting supplies.

About Higgins...  Higgins calligraphy ink is waterproof and dries black. It must be stirred before use to keep the blackening agent in suspension. Plein air painters might want to transfer ink to "Testor" bottles as the ink tends to leak from original containers making a mess in your backpack.  Testor bottles are available at D & J Hobby, San Tomas Aquino and Campbell Ave. in Campbell. The five pack includes small syringes and blank labels.

Check out Dick's paintings at http://www.dickzunkel.com/paintings/
To see how much fun our artists had using Dicks technique visit the paintsites blog at http://scvwspaintsites.blogspot.com/

He begins with a very quick sketch in pencil to establish the composition and perspective. Using a speedball dip pen and waterproof ink (Using non-waterproof ink will give a different look as it bleeds into the watercolor paint) Dick draws in the main lines of the scene - again fairly quickly. The speedball nibs create a variety of thick and thin lines adding to the character of the drawing. 

Once the ink is dry Dick wets the paper over the entire sky area and brushes on some Raw Sienna for warmth. He then washes in some Cobalt Blue, and adds a little Alizarin Crimson on the horizon, where mountains might be. He uses a flat 1" brush for most of the painting and loosely suggests all the elements, not being too careful about staying within his drawn lines.

Demo participants met at lunch to view the days results.

The group at the demo

The weather started out overcast, as Kay set up a full sheet of watercolor paper in front of a group of beautiful redwood trees. She showed us how to start with a good composition, but without working too long on a drawing. Then she used miskit to preserve the whites of some branches. Once that dried, she used a big wash brush and juicy wet paint to place her initial colors all over the paper working in large, simple shapes.

Owing to the damp conditions we got a chance to go off and start our own paintings as we waited for Kay's to dry before she could show us the next steps. This was a useful way of learning and allowed us to put her words of wisdom to immediate use.

Kay's setup

As the painting developed she instructed us to change colors often and vary our brushstrokes. She also told us to step away from our painting every so often to see it from a distance.
The painting demo took place over about 2 hours and of course the weather changed completely during that time, going from initially overcast, to gloriously sunny. Kay was a great teacher and had encouraging and helpful words to say about all our paintings. Our thanks to her for generously donating her time to the group and to Karen Druker for hosting a wonderful pot luck lunch and critique afterwards.

1. Starting the under-painting

2.  Lots of juicy wet paint

3.  Starting with some definition

4.  The trees go in

Here's a comment from one of the participants, Brad Santos - "I've come to think that our Paintsite Co-ordinators can control the weather as we always seem to have perfect conditions for the Thursday paint-outs, so I was surprised that it was quite cool and foggy for the Kay Duffy demo in the Los Altos Redwood Preserve.   But on further reflection, I wonder if they didn't dial up the fog so we could see how Kay deftly handles wildly changing light, color, and shadow conditions.  I learned a lot from watching and talking to Kay in the Preserve and even more in the post-luncheon critique at Karen Druker's."

5. Kay's finished painting

The group reviews their work.

The group reviews their work.

The "class" given by Sylvia and Jenny

An activity -- a 360 degree view of the park