Students began by doing a quick sketch of the set-up using only straight lines. Then they set about painting using only palette knives, and no brushes.

This is week 1 of a 3-week drawing workshop at the Dover Town Library. Terrific artists. I think kids just have a better innate sense of design than I had as a teen. Maybe it's because of all the visual material they're exposed to today. You can see it in the drawings.

I challenged this group to crop their still life so it goes off at least three of the canvas edges. This is week 5 of our 5 week class and I am blown away by the quality of the work. Nice job everyone!

Differentiating colors within a hue can be tricky business. One student works quickly, so I had her do a second painting with the same composition but using the complimentary colors for her palette. In my Youth Class, the kids worked in acrylics on black paper just to mix things up a bit.

My students took turns sitting for each other. I had them work out compositions with the camera and then work from photos - but not slavishly. We looked at Richard Diebenkorn, Toulouse Latrec, and several other painters for compositional and palette inspiration.

We've spent lots of time working from life and concentrating on finding correct value, hue, intensity as well as form and composition. This week we broke out and began with drips, straws, blotting and accidental marks. Then we looked for images and compositions. I read a classic Grimm's Fairy Tale called "Jorinda and Jorindel" to help them imagine what they might find. Great project for working outside!

Both my Adult and Youth classes showed great spirit in trying an exercise based on what modernist composer John Cage called "chance operations". It is a way to genrate ideas for making artwork using intuitive processes more than intellectual ones. Curious? Here are some of our results...