Tag: watercolour

Watercolours with Juve Furtado

Water has been a hot topic here in the Shuswap with our lake rising to near flooding levels and water boil advisories in our local news, but thankfully, the Blind Bay Hall found a fun way to focus on water…by offering a wonderful watercolour painting workshop! If you haven’t been to the Blind Bay Hall, the top floor is surrounded with windows to allow great natural light into the hall; awesome for painting and seeing true colours. The hall’s board invited Juve Furtado, AFCA member of the Canadian Federation of Artists, and award winning watercolorist from Vernon, to come back and offer a workshop showing participants how to develop his soft autumn scenes using his watercolour pouring techniques. Juve is not only an artist, but a retired teacher who is more than willing to share all his secrets, and so the students really get a lot of information about watercolour techniques and all their questions answered. He’s great at critiquing and helping you get to where you want to be with your art piece. The class was full and a besides going home with some new skills, you get to enjoy some fun time working with fellow artists, be it experienced or beginners, sharing their stories and love of art. If you would like more information about Juve and his art, visit his website at juvefurtado.com

Here are some photos of the of Juve demonstrating some of his techniques:

And workshop participants having fun painting:

Passion for Painting

The Thompson Nicola Shuswap Chapter (TNSC) of the Canadian Federation of Artists hosted an inspiring day of art called “Passion for Painting”. The demo event is an “extra” that is delivered by the TNSC as part of the 2017 National Show being held on April 21 – April 30, 2017. The presenters/artists doing the demonstrations are also the jurors of the art show. This year there were 3 demonstrations.

Watercolourist Marney-Rose Edge demonstrated how she creates her dramatic watercolour florals. This is the floral she was recreating:

Some pics with her work in progress:

Pastel Guru Roberta Combs demonstrated the precision of pastels at getting the colors just right to be able to recreate detail reflection on a metal apple depicted in this still life.

Roberta happens to have a great sense of humour too, as she joked around as she worked on her painting.

Debbie Milner-Lively has beautiful paintings often with people within her art. She is probably most well known for her beautiful rainy day paintings. The colours and reflections are a treat to the eye.

Here Debbie shows us how to obtain some of those reflective colours depicted on a rainy day! Here’s some of her work in progress.

Overall, a great day of learning, inspiration and networking with fellow art lovers!

Juve Furtado Workshop

Many of us here in the Shuswap had the privilege of attending a watercolour painting workshop run by Juve Furtado at the Blind Bay Hall this last weekend. If you haven’t seen Juve’s

work yet, you have to check out his website. http://juvefurtado.com His luminous lighted paintings and textured backgrounds create some beautiful watercolour paintings that are striking.

I am not a watercolour artist, as a matter of fact, I have never painted with watercolours, so although I knew this may be a challenge, I was excited to explore his techniques. Juve used to be a teacher, so we were lucky to have an instructor that really knew how to teach as well as paint, because they don’t always go hand in hand.

This technique requires quite a bit of planning upfront so you need to draw out your composition on the watercolour paper and add masking wherever you would like “white or very light” areas on the painting. Watercolour masking is a liquid that once applied turns gum like but is then removable by rubbing leaving the white watercolour paper showing through.

His backgrounds often start off using an indirect painting method called paint pourings.

He makes it look easy; it’s not. But the trick is to keep the canvas wet and work in sections focusing on where you want your strongest colors and manipulating the pouring to get you the tones you are looking for. Several pourings are completed using primary colors starting with lightest in places where you want backgrounds to be “lit” and moving towards darkest usually at the furtherest end of the paintings.

Once the pourings are complete, you can add some “splatter” by tapping on a loaded paint brush onto a wet canvas to provide some texture in the background giving the essence of foliage and trees. Then “direct painting”, using brushes to add in your trees, objects, etc that are part of your composition. You can soften any areas around the masking at this point as well by “brushing” the paint using a toothbrush or firmer bristle brush after the paint has been dampened. Finally, you remove the masking, where often the painting really begins to shine, and lightly tone down the white masking areas to shade the snow or add colour to other masked areas.

I managed between working on my painting to catch a few of the artist’s work in progress paintings. Think we captured the “essence” of the technique…now practice to get better at it!