Well, it has been a very long time since we hosted a watercolor workshop, but this one was worth the wait. This past Saturday, I was joined by Maria Loftsdottir, a well established artist from Iceland who happened to be visiting Saigon for a few days. Maria works in watercolor, but on this visit, she was inspired by the beautiful surroundings of the cafe and the rice paper canvas. Thanks for joining Saigon Art Retreats! |
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Inspired by our location, the theme of our workshop this week was flowers and coffee.... two things I love to wake up to! Our workshop participants learned the basic watercolor techniques in our postcard series, creating beautiful and vibrant small paintings. Hopefully the lessons learned will inspire bigger artworks and ideas to bloom. Thanks for painting with us, Lori and Marijke! A wonderful day painting with travellers and residents of Saigon at the cafe, and this day's workshop was focused on watercolor on silk painting. While everyone was a beginner at the technique, guests picked up the nuances of this medium quite well and made some impressive works. As always, some of the biggest lessons were those in color mixing and harmonizing..... a feature of every painting session. Thanks for painting with us and enjoy your works of art! There are actually many tricks to watercolor painting, and this week, we learned a solid five or six of them in order to paint our postcards....We had some beginners and some seasoned painters, and together we painted and learned some of the most important fundamentals in this medium. Our usual space is currently being renovated for the Tet new year and will be better than ever in a couple of weeks! That didn't slow us down at all....In the end, we were left with some new information, a couple of great little paintings, and a feeling of accomplishment to start our day. Thanks so much for attending the workshop! This week, the workshop attendants were really brave - watercolor on silk painting is not something most people have tried before. It's quite different in technique from the usual paint on paper watercolor painting. Silk can make colors bleed and run moreso than regular watercolors.....after practicing with the materials, our workshop attendants created their own paintings of lanterns and lotuses. It was a beautiful Saigon morning at the cafe, and it was great to see people trying new things in this wonderful city. Thanks! This was the first time that Saigon Art Retreats offered a 2-day workshop, and there were many advantages to adding that second day for our participants. The first day was spent learning and practicing the basic techniques associated with the watercolor medium, such as washes, blending, wet-on-wet technique and the illustrative use of outline pens. By the time we got to the second day, our participants had a variety of skills that they could apply to their own postcard compositions. Confidence can be translated in many ways, including through a painting. Each artist had just a little bit more confidence than when they started, and this allowed their own paintings to be more vibrant, expressive and representative of the artist's intentions. What a difference a day makes! Our new workshop, "From Saigon, With Love" is a way for people to bring back the joy of sending/receiving postcards..... a fading fad in the age of emails, facebook and instagrams. It's a workshop that is especially popular with travellers to Saigon, as it gives people the opportunity to create a unique memento of their trip while being creative and learning about the city's ca phe culture. Thanks to Samantha and Chloe - visitors from Australia, who made this an especially fun morning at Saigon Art Retreats! In addition to watercolor techniques such as washes, layers, and softening layer edges, we also learned about adding artist touches with outline inking pens. The results were beautiful and unique to each artist. Well done! Saigon is such a wonderful city because of all of the unique places to relax and meet with friends.... our new location - Cat Dang Cafe in district 5 - is no exception. Huge banyan trees and beautiful water sculptures are a great setting for our workshops. This past week we learned some basic watercolor techiniques while painting on the terrace area. Looking forward to many more workshops here. |
AuthorWritten by Lindsay, creator of Saigon Art Retreats Archives
March 2016
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