New class! Light & Color with Devin Cecil-Wishing

Starting this January, GCA will be offering a new, ongoing Saturday class: “Painting Light and Color” with Resident Artist and Instructor Devin Cecil-Wishing. 

We recently spoke with Devin about this new offering:

“I’ve been wanting to put together a class like this for a long time and have been thinking about the best ways to organize a class which takes the concepts of modeling light and form and combines them with a practical way of approaching color.  Lots of students who go through the cast drawing program still find that they struggle with transferring those skills over into color painting.  In this class my aim will be to show students that color can be approached in just as logical and methodical a way as we approach value in our drawings.

By discussing the mechanics of light and looking at why we see what we see, students will begin to understand that each fluctuation in hue, value and chroma is the result of a very specific set of circumstances in our lighting conditions.  By identifying exactly what causes something to look the way that it does, we will be able to much better figure out how to depict it in our paintings.

We’ll begin by briefly discussing some basic color theory and students will go through a handful of color mixing exercises specifically designed to get them thinking of color as a series of relationships rather than an arbitrary set of individual observations.  Once students have completed these exercises we will quickly move into a series of simple still life paintings.  By keeping our subject matter simple we’ll be able to focus our attention on the color relationships, form modeling and light effects so that students can learn the concepts and then easily apply them to any subject matter that they want.

While we go through these simple still life paintings students will also be learning how to physically construct a painting.  Time will be spent talking about underpaintings, general paint handling, materials and mediums, different painting surfaces, dealing with seams and edges and how to go through the entire process of making a finished painting, from the very beginning right up to the final touches and varnishing.

The beauty of understanding light is that it applies to any subject matter that the artist wishes to paint.  In addition to discussing light and color mixing we’ll also be looking at how some of the old masters handled color relationships in their paintings and how these concepts can be applied to things like portraits and figures.

As students become more advanced in their understanding we will discuss painting different types of surfaces (glass, metal, fur, skin, velvet, etc.) and how each of these surfaces interact differently with their light source.

If you are new to painting, this class will serve as a great introduction to modeling form in full color but it is my hope that even more advanced artists will benefit by gaining a deeper understanding of light and color.”

GCA is offering a special, introductory rate for this class, available only for those who sign up before December 1st for the winter session that runs 8 weeks: January 9 - February 27th. To sign up or view class details please click here.