Thank you to Mary Moquin for a lively and enlightening exploration of color, shape and what it means to be an artist and for opening your studio and sharing your expertise with our members.

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Mary starts by choosing her color palette.

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In her journey to understand color, Mary has created dozens of color wheels and charts.  She uses these to choose her palette, know how one color combines with another, and to remember how she made certain colors.

Mary advises using a limited palette and often uses analogous or complementary colors.

 

 

 

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She began by sketching with oil or water based

crayons (Caran d'Ache available on amazon) 

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                                                                                                  Mary often uses a computer program like “Pixelmator”                                                                                                        to experiment with blocks or color.

 

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She started, as she often does, with the color the sky.

But she never “always” does anyhing.

 

                                                                                                           Next she began to fill in the basic shapes with                                                                                                                         acrylic mixed with Liquitex clear gesso.

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Over the next several days, she will finish this painting in oil mixed with cold wax.  Though she begins with a yellow sky, she expects to finish with a lavender one.

 

Mary likes to paint on plastic in part because of the ease of cutting it to the size.  But she has used a variety of different materials including papers and canvas.

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She makes her own frames from specially milled maple to create a simple and elegant effect.  By framing all her paintings in the same way, her shows have a cohesive overall appearance, and she avoids those tiresome requests to “just swap” frames.  Check out Mary’s video on making your own frames on Youtube.

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Mary doesn’t clean her oil brushes, just wipes them off and stores them in a sealed plastic container in a mixture of safflower and clove oil.  The clove oil, about 10%, keeps the mixture from thickening.

 

Thank you, Mary, for a wonderful presentation.