Jean Haines: Watercolor Workout

Artist Jean Haines doesn’t want the fear of the blank page to keep you from painting. Instead, she encourages you to use small warm ups and studies to get the tools you need to get excited about working on larger pieces. In this workshop join Jean as she brings you through a series of increasingly complicated workouts to help you work on your brushwork and watercolor knowledge and to get you excited about painting. The workshop starts with a simple warm up of blending colors on a small piece of watercolor paper. Jean knows that relaxing warmups like this one can help you get to know your paintings. This first warm up then naturally leads into the first study and then the first complete painting. This natural progression is slow enough to paint along with and will give you the confidence (and skills) to move to bigger and more complicated paintings. Through her studies and finished painting, Jean shows you how to paint a rooster (study and completed painting), a flamingo (completed painting), a poppy (study) and then a very quick completed painting of a field of poppies.  Jean’s approach to teaching is incredibly beginner friendly while intermediate students will learn a lot by watching how adeptly she handles her fluid approach. Jean lays down pigment on dry paper and then sculpts out shapes and texture with water. It’s an approach that results in loose and personal paintings. Beginners will enjoy her approach to painting but may find the complete paintings a bit too complicated the first few attempts. Intermediate painters will benefit from Jean’s warmups as a way to get familiar with what their paints do.    Jean Haines A few notes: Jean uses 300 pound watercolor paper and this is a must for her style. 140lb paper will dry too quickly to try Jean’s techniques. There is some audio scratching in the fourth chapter. It doesn’t obscure what Jean is saying but it is noticeable enough that we wanted to give you a heads up about it. Don’t worry though. It doesn’t take away from Jean’s excellent teaching.   About Jean Haines Living in China was a time when studying brush control had the greatest impact on the evolvement of Jeans style. Later working with artists from India and Pakistan introduced vibrant colors in her results compared to her previous quieter watercolors created while living in Europe.   The combination of East meets West in her style is unavoidable and to be enjoyed. Free flow of water along with no fear of working directly minus the use of a preliminary sketch leads Jean to amazing results that often leave viewers of her working in awe. Light and the use of beautiful color along with the ability to take any ordinary subject and turn it into an extraordinary painting with consistently unique results is what many artists aspire to achieve. Furthermore, Jean has the ability to install enthusiasm and inspirational motivation in all around her. Paintings by Jean can be found in homes all over the world. Favorite subjects are highly sought after from galleries as are places on her ever growingly popular workshops. These are always restricted in number of places to ensure the value for those attending.   Jean is a member of the SWA, Society for Women Artists, and won the Anthony J Lester Award in 2009 during the SWA Annual Exhibition where her work was likened to Joseph Crawhalls from the famous Glasgow Boys. She regularly writes for art magazines and exhibits in many galleries.   Jean Haines, a favorite artist with a unique style and an ever growing following of watercolor fans. This artist of today will surely be a memorable famous artist of the future.   From 1989 to 2006 Jean traveled extensively living in France, Hong Kong, Dubai and Belgium.  During this time she spent many years touring Asia and the Middle East. Japan, China, Bali, Thailand, Guam, The Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Spain, Italy, USA, Africa, Egypt and many more wonderful countries have influenced her watercolors.