Molly Hashimoto

North Cascades Institute 2010 Painting Workshops

Registration is now open for the two painting workshops I am teaching at the North Cascades Institute.  

Landscape Watercolor in the North Cascades: June 28-30, 2010. The focus will be on learning a repertoire of watercolor techniques to represent the dramatic scenery of the North Cascades.

Autumn Beauty and Bounty: A Watercolor Feast: October 1-3, 2010. Paint the vivid hues of autumn in the North Cascades, including maples and larches, as well as working in the studio to create still life sketches of the local Skagit Valley harvest. 

Register by March 31, 2010 and receive a $50 early bird registration discount.

Woodblock Print: Swans

 I saw these beautiful swans last spring at the Union Bay Natural Area in Seattle, and photographed and sketched them. A friend suggested that they might make a good block print with their strong whites against the dark water. I had alot of fun carving this block and kept it small: 5" X 7". It went so much faster than the Yellowstone bison print I labored over for months. It helped to only have 2 colors, the blue and the black.  

This is the first in an edition of 25, medium: printing inks on Magnani Pescia Paper.

Price: $65

Sibelius called his 5th Symphony his "swan hymn." He wrote: Nothing in the whole world affects me--nothing in art, literature, or music--in the same way as do these swans and cranes and wild geese. Their voices and being.

More Student Art from the Snow Goose Festival

 
 Here are several more sketches and paintings created by the students who worked with me at the Saturday class at Four Springs House.

Students' Work: Sketching & Painting Birds

On Saturday's workshop at the  Snow Goose Festival on Camano Island, I enjoyed watching the progress of each of the students at Four Springs House.  Several students were intrigued by my many photos of great blue herons and green herons and had great success with them.  Here are a few in progress. I'll share more of the art in the coming days.

 

Sketching Birds in Watercolor at the Snow Goose Festival

Yesterday at Four Springs House on Camano Island, a group of artists of all ages helped to celebrate the annual Snow Goose Festival. The Friends of the Camano Island library asked me to come up and teach a class in sketching and paintng birds. I brought some of my favorite bird photos and all the materials and did a little bit of demonstrating to get everyone started.

I love working with students of all ages, as there is a happy camraderie that occurs with this mix--there aren't that many places where young and old can come together on such an equal footing. The setting was beautiful, as you can see the Preserve just outside the window.

Sitka Center for Art & Ecology

Registration is now open for the workshop I am teaching at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology on July 23- 25, 2010.  I painted these two views of Three Rocks on the Oregon coast in past years when I was teaching. From the studio students and I went down to the mouth of the Salmon River Estuary and painted. The sketch to the left was done from the summit of Cascade Head, one of the most marvelous views on the entire West Coast, which I have enjoyed for years.  Every time I go down to the central coast I make a point of heading up to Cascade Head. 
The sketch to the right was painted at the Salmon River one calm day whem reflected colors from the headland trees shimmered on the water.

Watercolor Travel Journal, Quick Sketches

I demonstrated these two quick sketches at the workshop I recently taught at Daniel Smith Artist Materials. You can read more about it on the Daniel Smith blog. The monochrome drawing on the left was done with the Stylist water-soluble pen, and is one of my favorite adobe structures in Taos, New Mexico--the Mabel Dodge Luhan house.   

I sketched the doorway below using my very small portable Winsor and Newton paintbox with Niji waterbrushes.  The hollyhocks bloom away in June at Rancho de Taos, New Mexico.

Egg Tempera Demonstration

 I've been working on Diablo Lake Island, North Cascades for several months. Egg tempera paintings are built up layer upon layer and they take time. I bought the panel from True Gesso and love the smooth gesso finish. These panels offer a beautiful painting support. I am so grateful that these quality panels are available ready-made--saving me the hours it would take to prepare them myself. 

I'm including a few of the earlier stages of this painting to demonstrate the process.
Step 1. Here I have sponged on several layers of a gray-green mixture. I use Daniel Smith dry ground pigments with egg yolk as the binding agent. I find just about  5 or 6 of the pigments are adequate for most of my painting needs.  A jar of dry ground pigments will last a long time, so it isn't especially expensive to get started with egg tempera. But don't buy ready-made egg tempera paints because they won't work at all the same way and you won't achieve the beautiful lustre of home tempered paint. 

In step 2 you can see that I have begun to sponge on the shapes of ridges and the island. In addition to the sponge, I used a flat brush lightly charged with paint. Before brushing, I dab the brush on a cloth to release the heaviest load of paint. If you leave blobs of paint on the panel, they often run the risk of being lifted by the next layer, so thin layers are important in egg tempera painting.

In step 3, I adjusted color towards yellow  on the trees in the middleground where colors began to be warmer. I also scumbled in some white over the entire panel.

In step 4, I used the flat brush to describe individual trees more specifically.

In step 5, the island trees and rock shapes are finally given more concrete form, plus I began to indicate the reflections in the water.

If you are interested in learning more about egg tempera, I recommend taking a class from the master painter and teacher Koo Schadler.  I have had the privilege of studying with her in 3 different classes. Her craftsmanship and knowledge of this beautiful and historic medium are unparalleled.

Watercolor Travel Journal, continued

 Janet Takahashi created this page after she got home, and had time to time ponder ideas we discussed about journals and the use of watercolor and other media.

She traveled to Seattle and stayed in a hotel near the Mariner's Safeco Field so one of her pages was a record of that experience.

Bob Horsley also sketched and painted with me last weekend at the workshop I taught at Daniel Smith and like Janet, generously shared some images of his work. I admire the convincing architectural perspective combined with the loose watercolor method.

 
Read more about watercolor travel journals on the Daniel Smith blog.

Watercolor Portraits

I'm currently teaching a class on portraits in watercolor, and as a preliminary exercise we painted from sculpture to practice modeling form with mostly monochromatic wash. This is a Roman copy of the Praxiteles Venus and is in the Vatican Museum in Rome. I mixed a gray using French ultramarine blue and burnt umber and it gave some interesting granularity. I used the same mixture for the dark background.

 I painted another study of the unhappy
Thimo, one of the founder figures in the Naumberg Cathedral in Germany. Each of the founder figures sculpted by the anonymous Naumberg Meister is fully human, each invested with intense emotional realism. To see them in person is a powerful experience.

Watercolor portraits can be meticulously sculpted with numerous washes, or rather more informally and quickly sketched.  In the Travel Journal workshop last weekend, I demonstrated the looser approach with this sketch of a young man, casually posing with hands in pockets.