Kim English Workshop

I recently attended a workshop with Kim English, in Colorado. I love his paintings especially the way he captures light. I had heard from other artists that attended his workshop that it was like "artists boot camp". They were right!! The first day we painted and wiped off about 50 paintings!! We were given between 5 - 15 minutes to complete each painting for the majority of the day. The first 2 days we had a model and the remaining 2 days were painted in the landscape.

There were many demos and since we all lived on a Ranch for the week we had a great chance to get to know Kim and he was willing to share all of his insights with us.

In the above demo he amazed us with his ability to take an ordinary subject like an old barn and turn it into a beautiful painting.

I think the 2 most important things that I learned from this workshop was that in order to paint the light you need to paint the dark. In other words quite often we try to make the light in our paintings dramatic and one way to do that is to darken the other values. The second is to use your full range of values.

I didn't save many paintings from this workshop as it was all about the process not the finished product - but I did save one.