Lake Tahoe and Workshop with Jan Foss

Had a Great week painting 6 hours a day in a week long watercolor workshop with Jan Foss of Lake Tahoe. See her paintings on her website, http://www.watercolorsbyjanfoss.com/.
Every day we did a new project on either a 1/4 or 1/2 sheet of paper. I really enjoyed this process of using the sheets vs the blocks. I mainly paint on blocks of watercolor since it's seems easier and what I have a lot right now. Using the sheets gave me the feeling of more creative rights to what I could paint and the scale. Painting big seemed intimidating, but Jan made it feel so natural and fun.

Jan is a wonderful artist and teacher. I really love her techniques on achieving the soft edges and colors she uses. She really helped us all with composition, scale and technique. I also liked the way she setup her palette. I had just set my palette up and found that I didn't like the way I had placed my colors around it, because i kept having to unnaturally reach for yellow to mix with my blue and mixing my blue with my red for purple. So I've been using up the paints and when I've got most of them used up on the palette, I'm going to re-setup my palette the way she did. I'll do a separate blog on that.

This picture is done on a 1/4 sheet, so it's larger than my scanner. It's a snow scene of Lake Tahoe. I'm going to use it for next year's Christmas card. It was great learning how to paint snow on trees. Jan showed us a couple of version on how to achieve snow on the trees, shadows and composition.