A fun painting from last summer using a palette knife for texturing.
11×14″ oil on board
SOLD
Alpaca
Category Archives: Workshop
Black Horse – Class with Mr. Tennison
Black Horse by Meg Lyman
12×9″ oil on board
This is one of the paintings I did at the fantastic class I took with James Tennison this summer. He is a phenomenal painter and teacher, and we all had a blast.
The Lull
I have returned intact from the workshop, and now I’m so stuffed with knowledge I can barely move. Thanks to Kate for putting up with us and sharing her top secret techniques. I look forward to using her painting method on some upcoming still life practice.
Cervid I by Meg Lyman
8×10″ oil on board
In honor of still life, here is a skull I painted. Before the workshop. Not only did I not use Kate’s technique, I painted it over an 8-year-old gouache painting on gessobord that was one of my very first paintings and was consequently horrible. Turns out you can use oil over gouache quite easily, although I know nothing about its longevity. All that aside, I believe it is a mule deer, advertised on Etsy as a found elk skull. People are really bad with taxonomy. I love identifying found skulls, but I admit I might be in the minority there.
Also, the first plug: come to see me at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend in Seattle! I’ll be at table LL-13. I may try painting between now and then, but these past two weeks have been all about learning and business.
Workshop
Guys, I’m so excited. This weekend is Kate Stone‘s workshop at WIFAS. The plan is to learn new oil painting techniques that I can apply to my super happy art plan. See you after!
Dumpy
Dumptruck I by Meg Lyman
6×6″ oil on canvas
For sale $45
Once, in a nice little town in Kentucky, there was a gravel lot with a fleet of rusty, unused dump trucks with giant tires. There was one with a layer of dirt in the back that created its own little ecosystem. Fascinating. I tried to use some of the techniques I learned in Qiang’s class on this one. I didn’t spend much time on the drawing and I know there are perspective errors, but they weren’t the focus of this exercise. I need more practice with this style… it’s so much fun.
Qiang Huang Workshop
Qiang Workshop I by Meg Lyman
Qiang Workshop II by Meg Lyman
As I mentioned, I had a workshop last weekend with Qiang Huang at the Whidbey Island Fine Arts Studio. It was a great learning experience, and like the other classes I’ve attended, I left feeling a strange combination of exhilarated motivation and bewilderment that I ever manage to paint anything worth looking at. After seeing great artists work, I have a very distinct feeling that I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s obviously not true, because I will slowly incorporate more and more of the things I learned from Qiang into my paintings. But for now I still feel like I’m painting with, as classmate Heywood put it, a sawed-off fence post.
I present these class works to you as they were when I left the workshop. The first one was about three hours (and a poorly-focused photo, sorry) and the second about six in 2 three-hour sessions – and the extra time shows. Plus, the master himself put a few strokes on the cloth in the second one! I could put some hours in retouching and fixing the things I see that are wrong with both of them, but I’ve found I learn better when I hold those errors in my mind. The unresolved issues jump out at me from the canvas and I strive to never let them show up again.
Speaking of canvas, I grabbed two Blick linen canvases on clearance for this workshop. It’s the first time I’ve used linen (as opposed to cotton) and I looooooooove it. It’s harder to find but now I crave it. Delicious, delicious linen.