CMW met at the Paramount Visual Art Center for their monthly membership meeting on November 14th. Dan Wiemer was the demo artist for the evening. Keep in mind, he is the chosen artist for our September three day workshop in 2023.
Linda Addicott wrote the following demo notes. Sandra Theis took photos. Thank you Linda and Sandra!
Tonight – Landscapes
Dan’s technique is with acrylic and watercolor. He’s been painting for 50 years since he was 8.
Project is 1/2 acrylics and 1/2 watercolor. He paints in what he calls the Canadian style, a style that has somewhat the appearance of woodcuts.
He creates the structure of the painting with acrylic and then puts watercolor over it. Gave examples of painting a tree painted on white paper, one painted on dark, one negatively painted and one with a dark negative.
He stressed linking the shadow shapes as how one creates the bones of a scene. Ex. painted the shadow of a tree to link to a house to link to a road.
With his demo he took a high contrast photo, put tracing paper over it, and traced the shapes. Painted mask around all the darks. The masked areas will be the watercolor areas.
1st Taped the photo with strong values and put tracing paper over it. Then outlines the outer edges with marker.
Using a marker made silhouette shapes of trees in the photo. Covering areas where darks are making shapes.
Have the lights and darks now identified on the paper. Took another liter grey marker and filled in the midtown areas. He left white areas.
Overall, he distilled the photo into its basic shapes.
It was interesting to note that he never really referred back to his value study. Someone asked him about this and he said he had a picture of it in his head.
Sketched onto #140 Arches paper making sure the area of interest was in the bottom 1/3rd of the paper.
Next pours masking into a large cup. He uses Windsor Newton mask which is white. Used mask to surround the darks. Used an acrylic brush that was wetted and had soap worked into it..
To paint on the mask, he held the brush at the end and used some backwards drawn strokes. Wasn’t extremely particular in making sure mask strokes all touched. He said he wanted to get different stroke directions. Surrounding silhouette shapes he left, he leaves open spots on the paper between some of his brush strokes.
He uses Windsor Newton paint. He works with compositions in contrasting or complimentary couples i.e. halo green and alizarin crimson; lite ultramarine blue and raw sienna. Also uses mat medium to mix into the acrylics to make a “sloppy” mixture. He treats the acrylics like watercolor painting. The acrylic mixture is light and watery. Mixing the colors in pairs on his pallet he paints over masked areas. 90% of this acrylic paint will be removed when the masking is lifted off.
Wiemer 6
Wiemer 7
Wiemer 8
Wiemer 9
Wiemer 10
He left the white paper the center of interest. In his painting it was the bottom of a waterfall.
Mixing the acrylic colors, he paints all over the masked areas moving onto the white areas in some spots but leaving white paper in the center where the waterfall was located.
After drying with a hair dryer (never do mask out in the sun for Plein air as it will not be removable) he removed the mask. The paint had filled in the spots between his brush strokes of mask, which gives the painting a woodcut look.
Then he painted into the white areas with watercolor. Fills in the white areas with medium value paint and does go back and darken areas that need it.
When using the watercolor, he let the paint colors mix on the paper instead of mixing them on the palette.
Wiemer 11
Wiemer 12
Wiemer 13
Wiemer 14
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