Roseta Santiago Workshop

A few weeks ago I took a workshop with Roseta Santiago at the Quinlan Art Center in Gainesville, Georgia. Roseta used to live in Atlanta, and now lives in New Mexico. She has studied under many of the same artists that I have so I thought I would learn some additional skills. The paintings below are all experimental. Each painting gave me different challenges along with having a medium problem all week long. My medium started to clump up during the gourd painting and brass bowl painting so I ended up switching mediums. The workshop was during the flood week so the combination of not having a full bottle of medium along with the humidity gave me problems. Also, there were many other students painting the same setup and objects seemed to move from day to day. In the Gourd painting the paint would not dry for me to do some glazing so finally I had to move on to another painting. The brass bowl painting also gave me problems with the medium and since I had lent my lights with the first painting(other students were painting same still life) I had no lighting for the second painting and was really working in very dark circumstances. When I paint at home I usually paint in low light, but this was ridiculous. On the Gold Rim painting Roseta actually came over and painted the beautiful gold rim so I can't take credit for that. It was great to learn how to layer the gold colors to get that look and then how to add the highlight of white. Also, I think in this painting there should have been some leafy stem in the painting; its boring to me. I would say that I learned more about glazing, how to change a painting that you might not be happy with, painting fabric and then glazing. Roseta is wonderful at marketing and was great in sharing her information with us. If you go into a Bass Pro Shop the murals in the stores were painted by her. After painting 23 of the stores she decided to go into oil painting full time.