I am heading home today after attending a fantastic workshop with Karen Burns all about painting with Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.  Karen creates such stunning work with her digital paintbrushes.  In this workshop she generously shared her methods, tips and techniques and resources for creating beautiful paintings.  While I know a bit about Photoshop, Corel Painter is a huge and powerful piece of software and learning the program can be a bit daunting for someone who just want to sit down and paint.  Karen gave us a roadmap to get started painting quickly and we all loved the results we were able to acheive in just one weekend. 

Besides demonstrating her painting techniques and sharing her secrets :-) Karen spent one-on-one time with each of us.  She suggested brushes we might use to achieve the results we were looking for or techniques we might consider to impove the compostion of our paintings.  At the end of the weekend we each went home with at least one finished painting - printed on fine art paper or canvas - that we can frame and hang on our wall at home.

I created FOUR paintings that I am thrilled with!  I have never before attended a workshop where I have been this productive and so well pleased with my work.  Kudos to Karen for being an outstanding teacher who conveys the knowledge of what she does so well and who inspires us to create paintings of our own.  Thank you, Karen for a truly awesome weekend!

Comments

[Katherine Malm]

These are terrific Mary! So which one did you decide to print? Looks like you had so much fun.

[karen]

Many thanks, Mary ~ it was my pleasure to host the workshop ~ we'll see if you can't get together for part two :-)

~Karen

[Mary Bailey]

Hi Katherine!

I decided to print two :-) Both have some personal significance to me. The watercolor on the beach is a photo of my husband and our niece on a vacation a couple of years ago in California. The other one I printed is the old mining buildings by the lakeshore - this is a cc photo of northern Michigan - were I attended college. I loved the contrast of red and green in that image and it was a fun way to try out lots of different brushes on the buildings. It was good to stretch my wings and try something new.

Looks like you had a great time in DLand with Tangie. What fun it must have been to explore the park with artist eyes and take the time to document your time there.
Mary

[Katherine]

Oh yay ... I really love the buildings ...my favorite of the bunch. Yes, DLand was fun ... but COLD!

[karen]

I'm popping in over here to copy your wonderful testimonial for my testimonial page on my website.
thank you, mary :-)

~K