Calico Art - Carol Vaage

A blank white paper, a new palette, great brushes, and panic sets in! I had several teachers that helped me past that blank page fear, walking me through different aspects of art, opening my mind, removing the blocks of internal messages of ‘you are not an artist’.

Kathryn Hines

My family gifted me a watercolour sketchbook class offered by the City of Edmonton with Kathryn Hines. At our first session, Kathryn set up a still life arrangement consisting of a green teapot, white creamer, olive vase, an orange, and a blue and white checked tablecloth. Our tools? 3 primary colours squeezed onto a foam plate, a piece of paper, and an unruly mid-sized Chinese paintbrush. Frankly, I was stunned, but gave it a shot. Then the group critiqued all the paintings. Amazingly, mine was not the worst, nor the best, and to me, it seemed like my colour mixing was awesome. 

You can see the objects are floating, and the teapot has a unique shape. I chose not to attempt all the still-life objects but loved the beautiful background effects.

Kathryn helped me become bolder with pencil lines and sketching. I learned how to do amazing gradients. She also opened my eyes to the difference between realistic and loose paintings. I began to see the beginnings of my favorite art style.

Edmonton Lifelong Learners Association (ELLA)

Every spring, ELLA holds three week-long spring session classes at the University of Alberta. The daily art classes were almost 3 hours, so a great deal of information and practice was shared. Two of the artists I studied with Susanne Lamoureux and Frances Alty-Arscott

Susanne Lamoureux

Beginner Drawing – Definitely not in my wheelhouse. But with Susanne’s teaching expertise, I learned so many new skills and techniques. We explored pencils of different values, graphite, and charcoal. Experimenting with paper textures and erasers, we selected different photos to represent.

Watercolour Pencils – Susanne offered other courses that I took as well, such as Watercolour Pencils, and Pencil Crayons. She helped me learn layering, glazing, and patience.

Frances Alty-Arscott

Frances drew me in to her watercolour style with the brilliant, vibrant colours and bold strokes. We learned how to represent impressionistically rather than realistically. Frances had us work through value studies of our photos, followed by colour studies before we began working on the actual painting. Focusing on the light source and shadows, we learned to create dimension in our paintings. The technique of using masking tape to block out areas for trees was a fantastic tip (below left). She praised me for my mark making with flicks and palette knife work (below right).

Willie Wong

Willie is a favorite art teacher in Edmonton, offering 6-week courses through the South-West Seniors Association (SWESA) watercolour and acrylics. He brings detailed drawings and guides us step-by-step to produce a stunning, beautiful realistic painting. I’ve taken a few of his courses, and his wealth of knowledge and practical tips that he shares are amazing. He has an affinity for his not-so-clean palette and demonstrated how adding different colours here and there can make a painting pop.

Studying under the masters was the only way to become an artist in previous generations: apprenticing, learning techniques, design, composition, form, line.

But today, it’s possible to study virtually with artists from anywhere, by studying their style, colour choices, compositions, use of light and shadow. My Pinterest page of artists show more than 50 artists and 2000 images. They are organized alphabetically and can be found at:  https://www.pinterest.ca/carolvaage/artists/.

At first, it was the renowned artists that I studied, like Picasso, Emily Carr. Practicing their pieces helped me to become bolder with use of colour and unrealistic artistry.

My first ‘aha’ was discovering the Group of Seven. Even, never having studied art, I had heard about this group through my school years but had never seen the images. When I began to look at their work, I was struck by how it called to me. Enlarging the images on my computer allowed me to take in the impact and strength of their work. Images of Canada. Broken into segments of colour and shape. The wild and the raw of our landscape – forests, mountains, lakes. Falling in love with their art led to research their style. https://www.pinterest.ca/carolvaage/artists/group-of-seven/.

As happens with Pinterest, as soon as you express an interest in a subject, they recommend similar images, like Erica Hawkes, Robbie Craig, and Nicholas Bott. When I studied their work, patterns began to emerge. The flow of lines. The use of colour. The foreground versus distance. Composition. My love of nature blended with this style, and I attempted paintings with my own images using their style.

Studying Emily Carr, led me to painting trees with swooping, curved lines and using unusual colours. Her work with Indigenous topics, led me to explore Benjamin Chee Chee and Norval Morrisseau. I spent several months working in this style, loving the bold strong colours and contrasting blacks. At this point, I created my only self-portrait thus far using this style of art.

With so many of the art galleries, museums and artist websites having online images of artwork, it is possible to branch out in many different directions. Immerse yourself in an artist’s style until you can recognize it anywhere, and experiment with the techniques they’ve used. You’ll soon find that certain bits become adapted into your own style. They become the influencers for your growth and development.

ELLA stands for Edmonton Lifelong Learners Association, which operates 3 weeks of courses for 55+ at the University.

My first year of attending, I took Susanne's course for beginning drawing. At this time, I had zero confidence in my abilities to draw other than a stick figure. However, Susanne taught me to see. To see shapes and lines, to take one step at a time. She was excellent at teaching techniques and using drawing materials, like pencils, fine line black markers, graphite, and charcoal. We actually worked on complex pieces and chose our own final projects.

The face is drawn using a photograph. We used measurements to capture the placement of eyes, lines, and shapes.

This African Tree is my final project. For this, we used graphite powder and erasers to create the image.