We invite you to join us for a workshop celebrating the New Mexico landscape in bloom! This workshop encourages you to develop your sense of play with watercolor and let go of perfection. We’ll create and mix luminous Spring color combinations to evoke the very special flora, both wild and cultivated of New Mexico in Springtime. We'll play with brush techniques using different processes and get comfortable with intuitive ways of painting and drawing the landscape in untraditional ways. I’ll teach you ways to evoke light, find the mood of your skies, play with creating clouds in unexpected ways, and imagine the lines and textures of where earth meets sky in New Mexico. We’ll also laugh a lot and enjoy an amazing afternoon in the beautiful sunny studio of LDBA.

In this class, we’ll explore why artists have been drawn to the landscapes of New Mexico and consider the lines and forms where land meets sky. We’ll convey the beautiful poetry of Spring and the New Mexico landscape with water and color. We’ll work through playful and meditative exercises with a chance to play with the extraordinary handmade watercolors of LDBA.

We’ll practice ways in which to view landscapes in new and imaginative ways while considering how we might express our own singular sense of place. We’ll translate our unique visions of the colors and shapes of fall: the changing trees, the land, sky, clouds, moons, and stars through technique such as laying washes and layering to balance ideas of weight and atmosphere in watercolor. The focus will be on color, control and letting go of control as we practice simple watercolor mark-making and how our own touch can transform water + color into form, line, texture, and composition. . 

While we play, we’ll talk about materials and choosing color palettes that are uniquely our own as well as traditional and non-traditional techniques (such as layering and texture) and setting up your own practice for working with watercolor and mixed media. You’ll leave with a new sense of what watercolor painting can be and some beautiful paintings.

All skill levels welcome and all materials provided!

Deborah Stein lives, paints and writes in NYC and the Embudo Valley in New Mexico. She teaches visual narrative workshops, runs twice a year artist residencies. Deborah studied the passing on of traditional arts with a toymaker family in Northern India, worked with NYC school kids as a museum educator at the Museum of Arts & Design and has traveled and taught alternative arts education workshops about seeing and translating the world in new ways for adults and children for a lifetime. 

Saturday, April 27
1-4 pm
Class limit: 8

La Petite Ecole
717 Canyon Road Unit C
Santa Fe, NM 87501