Thanksgiving Give-Away -- And the Winner Is!......

Drum roll please......

The winner of the Thanksgiving Give-Away is:
Pat Knepshield from Vandergrift, PA

Congratulations Pat!

Pat will receive the boxed gift set of 10 Christmas Cards (shown below)

In the people's choice vote for your favorite card the results were:
#1 32 votes
#2 18 votes
#3 28 votes
#4 22 votes
#5 27 votes

There were 349 entries for this inaugural Thanksgiving Give-Away
Thanks to each of you for your participation!
Many of you left me comments on my DVDs, my website,
and how my tips have been helpful to you.
THANK YOU!
I read every single word! It is good to know that what I share is worth
the time and effort that is involved.

This was so much fun! Let's do it again!
On December 17th I'll post another
Give Away for January 1, 2011
I think that should be a good way to welcome a New Year!

Happy Holidays to each of you!
Keep those Brushes Wet!
SUSIE

Thanksgiving Greeting Card Give-Away

Happy Thanksgiving!

To express my thanks and appreciation to my students, followers, and newsletter subscribers I'm having a little Thank You Give-Away. All you need to do to participate is enter!!

ENTER HERE

The prize, if I can call it that, is a set of my best selling Winter Holiday/Christmas Cards. The set of ten cards shown below contains five images with two cards of each image with matching envelopes in a clear gift box.


Entries will end at midnight November 30, 2010. The winner will be announced the first day of the month...December 1, 2010 here on my Splashes and Splatters Blog.

You are invited to join my blog followers so you don't miss the announcement!

GOOD LUCK!!!

Susie

Hints and Tips for Painting Waves in watercolor

It's done!
Ready to ship!
What is it?
My second DVD on painting waves.
See the You Tube trailer on the top right >>>>>>

Hint's and Tips for Painting Waves in Watercolor

There simply wasn't enough space in the first DVD to say and show everything I want to share, so I put together another DVD workshop with more tips and practice exercises to show more options for painting the parts of a wave. This new DVD is 1 hour and 38 minutes. It is quite different from the first wave DVD called Making Waves.

Hints and tips for Painting Waves in Watercolor is an informative fun filled video workshop using basic watercolor techniques and the easy to follow practice exercises for learning how to paint each part of a wave. I will demonstrate how to use three different brushes and several brush stroke techniques so you can find a method to that works best for you and your style of painting. I will also share some of my special tricks and special effects to help you reserve and recover whites as you paint frothy foam and splashing sea spray.

For those of you who would like to have a printed version of the practice exercises I demonstrate during the DVD workshop Hint's and Tips for Painting Waves, there is a companion workbook available. (Sold separately) This loose leaf 33 page workbook is designed to be used along with the DVD or can be used as a stand alone resource.
Click here for more information

Introductory price $16.99 plus s/h

Mt Rainier Painting SHORT Trip

SHORT TRIP to Mt Rainier 2010

This years trip to the mountain to paint the wildflowers on Mount Rainier was a wonderful experience. The wildflowers were a little late this summer due to the late snow melt, so I suspect we would have seen more blooms the following weekend, but we certainly could not complain about our weather this year! It was gorgeous!

There were four of us painting from the parking lot at the Sunrise Visitor's Center on Saturday Above are: Hilary, Lori and Terry applying brush to paper and behold (!) here we are with our paintings!

We will go again next summer maybe you can join us!

Hilary, Terry and Lori at Mt Rainier.

Oh my! Spring Tulips!

Oh, what a welcome sight! Tulips Blooming!

The calendar says spring has sprung and when you see the tulips starting to pop up it's not hard to imagine that the winter is really behind us and warmer temps are just around the corner. My Tuesday Afternoon Watercolor class got their brushes wet this past week and painted some beautiful tulips from last year's photos. This is a work-in-progress shot of a tulip painting I started as a demo.
Here is a tip for painting red tulips in the sunshine. Paint the tulips yellow first, then glaze the red paint over the bright yellow tulips. You might like the variety of the mixed colors and decide to leave some yellow as you see in the example above. It's not completely finished, but I do like what I see so far!
I can't wait to go to the tulip fields to see them in full bloom this year! It won't be long the daffodils are blooming now and the tulips are not far behind.

Another Wave...This one is for Vicki

This is my Spring SWAP painting for my partner Vicki Greene.

Sharing With Artist Partners is a wonderful spin-off group of artists from my Watercolor Workshop group. Both are international groups with artists members from around the world. We exchange paintings each quarter (4 times a year) and this is our 25th SWAP. Our paintings are all 5" x 7 " watercolors.

I'm still waiting for my SWAP painting and wondering where it will be coming from???

It's almost like Christmas .... very exciting and a lot of fun!

Happy Painitng Everyone!

SUSIE

Sunset Sky with Tree Silhouettes

This was my demo for my Wednesday night class. I promised the class I would share it when I finished it. The reference for this painting was a photo I took near Deception Pass at sunset overlooking the Straight of Juan de Fuca, Washington State.

When you paint a beautiful sunset sky with nice reflections it can be very challenging to add the dark silhouetes tree shapes in the forground. But quite often the drama is worth the challenge!

The painting is 11" x 15" Arches 140# CP paper using Daniel Smith Watercolors painted with my 1" Susie Brush and a #4 rigger.

Painting Skies and Clouds

This coming weekend (March 13-14) I will host a weekend workshop for artists who have a 9-5 job in another career. It is really hard for working people to find classes on the weekends so I'm trying to fill this void in my own special way. If you live in the Seattle area I'd like to invite you to join me and take a weekend watercolor workshop. (Even if you don't work at another job!)

Our topic for this workshop will be painting watercolor skies. If all goes as planned we will end up with at least nine or more skies to use on future landscape painitngs. These are a few of my skies and clouds "starts" that came from my paintbrush in preparing for the class.

And speaking of future landscapes....the April weekend workshop (April 10-11) is on painting "Landscape Elements" ( trees, rocks, mountains, bushes, grasses, etc) Join us if you can! Register here.

Happy Painting!

Keep those brushes wet!

SUSIE

Making Waves DVD has been Released!

Hip Hip Hooray! The new DVD is ready to hit the market!

Are you ready for Making Waves?? Order Here!

All the pre-release orders are in the mail and on their way to the studios of fellow artists. (THANKS!)

Wow, what a feeling! I'm so glad to have this latest effort behind me and now I'm ready to start the next one....well almost! In case you don't know the whole story, I do have other DVD videos and while they have been very successful (thank you very much!) this is the first project I've produced totally on my own "in house". (....or should I say "in studio"?) It was a great big learning curve and I now have a fresh respect for videographers and what all is involved in filming and editing and producing....etc.

You'll find a short YouTube preview here on my blog in the right hand sidebar. Take a peek and let me know what you think.

I'm always interested in learning what topics you might like to see me paint for future DVDs.
Here's a link to a page on my website to add your DVD suggestions

Thanks for stopping by! Keep those brushes wet!
SUSIE

Announcing my new DVD! Making Waves

Hip Hip Hooray! My new DVD is finally here and scheduled for release on March 1, 2010! I'm excited to get this one to you. Some of you may remember my wave studies I posted in a previous blog post and after several requests I've been working on this video workshop on how to paint a wave. I'm happy with the final version and ready to share it with you all.
The Making Waves DVD covers my process for painting wave #297 from my photo references as I show you step-by-step how to paint this wave. I'm including the reference photo and a painting pattern with the DVD along with a copy of my painted wave. The running time is 1 hour and 40 minutes which covers the entire painting process plus a few Bonus Tips on adding some finishing touches to your waves.
As with anything new and different it wasn't without it's little quirks. The biggest hurdle we had to jump was "too much of a good thing"....yes.... I talked too much! (Go ahead laugh!)
I had so many tips, tricks and techniques to share that we ended up cutting out a bunch of good footage....enough to make a second video........so........I'm pleased to say I'll be launching a follow up video called Hints and Tips for Painting Ocean Waves as soon as we can get it pulled together.

For more information and to order the DVD go to my website http://artstore.susieshort.net/dvd-store.html

The Making Waves DVD is at the top of the list.
You are invited to take advantage of my Pre-Release Special Offer
If you order before February 27th the shipping is FREE!

Keep those brushes wet!
SUSIE

February Already!

My oh my, where does time go? We are already into February.

I've been painting on some new projects and working on some new videos to be released this spring. It seems like when I'm in production mode the whole world races past me while I'm locked in my own secret studio. I promise I don't have my head in the sand! Or do I? (Smile) Now that's a picture to imagine!

I had a nice visit with my son, Hunter, visiting from Texas. He was here for almost a week and believe it or not it didn't rain the whole time he was here. I wish he could have stayed longer and I wish there weren't so many miles between us so we could visit more often. Sigh, if only!

The subject for my Wednesday evening class this month has been 'birds.' We are working with masking fluid and learning techniques for painting wet-in-wet backgrounds as a back drop for our feathered friends.

I'll attach my bird painting demo (in progress) and update it in a couple of weeks.

Happy Painting everyone!

SUSIE

Welcoming 2010

Happy New Year Everyone!
Are you a resolution maker and breaker? I was....:) so I stopped making new years resolutions a few years back. Hey, if you don't make them you can't break them, right?
So, I don't know if this is a resolution or just a goal but I do plan to blog more often. My plan is already nine days behind... but I can't go back so the best thing for me to do is begin!

Today is a special day. First, it was my Grandmother's birthday. She's been gone for 18 years now and I still miss her every day. I wish I could share some of my news with her. I believe she would be proud of me. She was always such a sweet lady.

And today is the 10th Anniversary of my online watercolor group called Watercolor Workshop.
It is a group hosted by Yahoo! and our membership is hovering just under 2000 members from around the world. It's hard to believe ten years has gone by since we began sharing emails about watercolor online. I've made so many wonderful friends through this group and I know that the group has made a difference and served as a stepping stone to many watercolorists who have come and gone and many who are still active. It's been amazing to watch their careers grow and take off successfully. Smiling I can honestly say ..."I knew them when..."

So here's to the wonderful watercolor artists at Watercolor Workshop! Thanks for making our group one of the best if not the very best groups online!


Keep those brushes wet!
SUSIE