Painting Seminar in Mount Shasta, California will teach you about watercolor and acrylic paint, light and color, and outdoor painting techniques.

Painting Seminar Introduction

"Painting is a way of reducing the world to areas of color using light and shadow to add dimension, line and direction to add interest. Painting is a quiet and personal art form. What your eyes see is interpreted by your soul. Expressing your vision requires skills and familiarity with the medium you choose. We can explore together."
— Carolyn Costa

Painting has been a passion of Carolyn's since she was a child. She has worked with a diversified variety of paints and handles them all exceptionally well. She feels that paint can provide depth and intensity of color seldom available in other mediums. Teaching others to handle paint adds a sense of satisfaction to her own ability to produce beautiful paintings. Carolyn feels that sharing her skills with others gives her the opportunity to share her gift and to enrich the lives of others. Her work is rich with color and illustrates a thorough understanding of the elements of design.

Liquid Color Flowing Into Original Art
— 3 Day Painting Seminar

Invest 3 days creating expressions of your own personal images with color in a liquid form. Explore painting with a small group of people while learning to express yourself with liquid color. Discover watercolor and acrylics in both a studio setting and outdoors under the towering majesty of Mount Shasta. All materials will be provided for you. Class size will vary from 6 to 12 students. Discuss your own creativity over lunches and a special farewell dinner and meet a rich collection of new friends.

Day 1:

The first morning will begin with a discussion of light, white and liquid color. We will talk about different kinds of paint and experiment with a few simple exercises mixing, thinning and spreading paint. We'll talk about different papers and canvases, and how each respond to different surfaces. Lunch will be served at noon and then we will go on to discover watercolor. We will see just how light is drawn from the paper by leaving areas blank and explore how using splatters and runs can turn a simple mix of colors into an interesting piece of art.

Day 2:

We will use watercolors again in the morning, choosing our own subjects, setting up our own scenes and turning blank paper into original artwork. After a casual lunch we will begin with acrylics and explore how white paint can supplement the white light within the canvas. We will discuss the tools and painting mediums that can change acrylic paint into different viscosities to create different effects. At the end of the day we'll share our results over hors d'oeuvres.

Day 3:

The morning will start with a discussion of the possibilities we will find when we start looking outside for pieces of the landscape around Mount Shasta. Individual choices may run from close-ups of wildflowers and rocks to panoramas of the mountain or crooked, wind-bent trees. When we are painting en plein air, we will work fast with acrylics using brushes and palatte knives to capture the light before it moves away. We'll have brown bag lunches to take with us so that we can all work on our own creative timetables. In the late afternoon we will share the pictures each of us has captured on canvas.

Dinner will be at 7 pm where we will share our experiences and our new friendships. It is my hope that after three days of intense studying you will leave here inspired to continue painting and will have found new and exciting ways of expressing your own unique individuality.

 Learn about painting in a small group setting in Mount Shasta, California