Jennifer McChristian Plein Air Workshop

I recently was lucky enough to attend one of Jennifer McChristian's in beautiful Ojai, California.  She is a fantastic teacher willing to share all of her knowledge and technique.

I had very little experience with plein air painting before attending her workshop.  I was looking for a method that made the task a little less daunting and came away from the week with Jennifer armed with a step by step way to take what seemed like an insurmountable task.

Her method involves doing a thumb nail sketch and then assigning one of four values to each shape.

The first day we concentrated on doing black and white paintings using 4 values.

This was my effort; a planter with fronds lit by the sun against a hillside.  We were only able to use 4 values.  It forced you to concentrate on the values and value pattern.

The next day we did the same exercise but used colour to represent the values.  Here is my effort.

We were to keep the values separate with no blending concentrating of the temperature, colour and value.

Further on in the week we were able to complete several small paintings using the method above.

I took advantage of one of the other students painting up on the hill.

I came away from the experience armed with technique, method and enthusiasm. I hope to spend many hours this summer outside enjoying plein air painting.

Here is a photo of one of Jennifer's demos.