Impressionist Painting Class

Today we did an outdoor color study of a still-life. The idea was to have the colors relate to each other in such a way that there is a convincing impression of bright sunlight and shade. I tried to pick one color note for each color mass for example, I tried to find one color to represent the table in light and the table in shadow... the bowl in light and the bowl in shadow both for the inside and the outside of the bowl. Once these colors work well together to describe the outdoor light, subtle colors can be added to better describe how the light varies in these masses. I am told that this is the opposite of how the old Impressionist master such as Monet would work. They would build up little impressions of light and build up the masses with them. We build the masses first and them model them with subtle impressions of color. John Ebersberger is my teacher for this class and his beautiful Impressionist paintings can be seen on his website. Just click on his name to follow the link.