Portraiture

Last weekend the FCPS was privileged to host a workshop with noted portrait artist Ann Manry Kenyon. We had a good group of eager participants at the workshop.

Students worked from a live model, and Ann was generous in spending time with students to give them instructions and critiques.

This was a big change for many of our artists, who often choose landscapes as their subjects, so it was a great opportunity for personal growth and stretching the limits.

How great it is to belong to a wonderful organization like the FCPS which gives us opportunities to do something like this. Many thanks to Ann for being the juror and judge for our Spring juried show, and for offering this workshop with her.

It's almost time for our summer break, so stay tuned for details about our last outing for the season in June, where we will head north this year to Castaway Island Preserve.

Complementary colors

Our May meeting turned out to be just as much fun as it sounded like it would be, with Lyn Asselta offering us all a mini-workshop in using complementary colors.

We had 25 attendees at our meeting, which may well be a record, that's almost half our membership, which is a great percentage indeed. We all had our supplies for the mini-workshop.

We all listened attentively to Lyn as she lectured us, and showed us examples of artworks using limited palettes and complementary colors'

Lyn chose the yellow and purple families for her complementary colors, where she had asked us to use only two complementary colors with three different values in each color, but you were also free to use red/green or blue/orange, and between the 25 of us we used all the different combinations.

After Lyn presented we all out to work on our own examples since we only had about 40 minutes to try to put her suggestions into action

Meanwhile Lyn continued to work on her own painting, and showed us how much could be done so quickly with such a limited palette.

We needed to be out of our meeting room by noon, so after 40 minutes we stopped to tape our own works up on the wall.

Even with such a short amount of time it was fun to see what everyone did using only two different colors, three values of each. Everyone did a great job! It's always fun to see the variety produced by our members.

It was also great to see what a wonderful article we had in the Jacksonville Times-Union "Beaches" section about the opening of our juried show the previous weekend. The show is up through the end of this month. Go see it!