Zen Houses Workshop with Jodi Ohl

I have been a fan of Jodi Ohl‘s artwork for many years.  She has a fun, whimsical style.  Last summer, I went to a workshop taught by her and had so much fun that I signed up for another weekend painting class with her.  The theme last summer was Zen Painting (in an abstract style).  This summer, the class I signed up for was Zen Houses, which uses similar techniques taught in the Zen Painting class.  I loved both of these workshops.

When I arrived at the two day workshop, some supplies, blank gesso panels, a postcard and thick booklet with instructions were waiting for me.  Yum!  I can’t wait to get started.

We started with a few warm up exercises to get familiar with our tools.  One of the supplies we used was a water soluble graphite pencil.  By brushing on top of it with a water brush, you can “activate” the graphite to blend and run.  It is a very fun process!

We practiced using our permanent markers and watersoluble pencils to draw a window.  This was another fun and useful exercise.

Throughout this whole weekend, Jodi demonstrated her techniques and did an awesome job of showing us lots of examples.

We began our “real projects” by sketching a couple of houses on our two 6 “x 6″gessoboard canvases.

The lines that were drawn with water soluble pencils were activated with water.  Regular drawing pencils were used for parts we did not want to blend.

Next we used neutral high flow acrylic inks and diluted India ink to create the underpainting for our painting.

More color was tentatively added.  I was nervous at this point to mess up my paintings!

That is as far as I got on the first day.  But, I am going to show you the same paintings in a row so you can see the progression from start to finish.  Below is a picture of the paintings finished with the paint layers.

After everything was finished and dry (after I returned home), I used thin Micron pens to add details and line work.  It is amazing how much more finished the paintings look with the extra line work.  The details seem to pop out more!

These paintings were 6″x6″.  Each of the numbers on these houses feature a house address number that I lived at.

The number 7228 is our Girl Scout troop number.

After the first day, we had homework to sketch out some ideas for our larger 12″ x 12″ gessoed panel.  I was able to sit outside the room where I was staying to do some sketching outdoors.  Unfortunately it started raining before long.

Here are some of the sketches I came up with.

The cottage has been sketched on to the board and the underpainting has begun.

Blocking in more of the shades underneath.

I’m slowly starting to add color.

Here is the artwork with the painting layers finished.  Next step will be adding pen details and line work.

Ta Da!  Here is the finished Cozy Creative Cottage.

The workshop was held in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, which is a really cute little town.

It was Pride weekend, so there were colorful rainbow flags all over town.       

Here was a table of Jodi Ohl’s artwork.         

Here were my finished paintings again.

Thanks for reading!  Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

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