Ellen Roles

ELLEN ROLES TWSA
May 24 - 29, 2009 (Four Teaching Days)      
Watercolor: Design and Color Choices
New to Dillman's www.ellenroles.com

Want to get your creative juices flowing? Ellen inspires students to discover their individual inner gifting and respond to it. She will encourage excellence, give students knowledge and experi­ence toward creativity, artful painting, and design guided by choice and personal preference.

Ellen will teach technical competency-that is, the understanding of qualities of various pigments and how to apply paint to paper so that each student will gain the ability to paint what they have always wanted to paint. The elements of size, shape, color, and how to use them to create unity and interesting contrast will be studied.

Ellen's Biography

"My earliest memory of doing art is sketching trees at our S.E. Minnesota farm. My mother bought me some pencils, a sketchbook and the book How to Draw Trees. I signed up for the first class available in high school, and took every class I could in college. But I never saw anyone paint a watercolor.

More than thirty years ago at an Arts and Crafts Show in northern Minnesota, I saw a watercolor demonstration by Gerry Korte. It had a profound effect on me watching him paint sky, trees, rocks, cabin, and reflections so easily with his brush. I knew then I just had to learn to paint with watercolor.

At the beginning of my watercolor experience I have had the wonderful opportunity of receiving instruction from highly qualified instructors. My first class in watercolor was with Soltan Zabo, an international instructor and author. I thought it was normal to have instructors with those credentials, including Ed Whitney, Frank Webb, Robert E. Wood, Tony Van Hasselt, John Gaddis, Nita Engle, Soltan Zabo, and Skip Lawrence.

My teachers emphasized composition and design as well as technique. In addition to workshops, I attended an art group which had weekly critique sessions. We learned that you could paint a tree the way it was, but far better to consider the shape, hue, intensity, value, size, placement, and texture in relation to the rest of the painting. Better to design the painting than let it happen by accident. Now I live near the Mississippi River surrounded by bluffs, valleys and coulees.

I currently teach locally and regionally. It does my heart good to live in this exceptionally beautiful location. The Transparent Watercolor Society (TWSA) is the only national watercolor society requiring that paintings must be watercolor applied in a transparent manner. An artist is invited to Signature Membership after juried acceptance in three annual exhibits of TWSA. I

I am grateful to receive the letters in 2008."                               
Studio: Something for all levels.
Ellen offers a partial tuition scholarship.
Workshop Fee: $375 + tax.
Room & 1 Dinner Fee: $308.75 + tax