Workshop: Integrating Paper and Paint

 Diane Johannigman's Workshop

On Sep 27th SIAG (our art guild) hosted a workshop by Diane Johannigman, a Cincinnati artist who experiments combining paper with acrylic paints. Here are some of her recent paintings:

About Diane:

Diane  was born into an artistic family, with her mother, a Cincinnati artist herself, ensuring she had lots of opportunity to learn and express herself. She graduated with an art degree from Houston, Texas. However, traditional methods and "rules" seemed too confining for her, and she decided she wasn't going to make a living at it. 

Just before Diane retired from Costco as a manager, she decided to re-explore her innate desire to create art. She started attending Sandy Maudlin's open studio, working with water color and yupo, taking every opportunity to expand her vision. The environment of Sandy's open studio encouraged risk taking, especially when Sandy invited artists to do workshops at her studio.

You might say that workshops with popular Canadian artist, Jean Pedersen, opened the creative doors that led to Diane's current work. More about Jean can be read here:

https://www.jeanpederson.com/artist/

You can discover more about Diane on her Instagram account.

https://www.instagram.com/dianejohanni/?hl=en

About the process:

You can do this either on watercolor paper or canvas. Most of us began with putting drops of heavy body acrylic paint from the tube directly on the canvas. (3 colors) Some of us used canvas with previous unsuccessful paintings as a first layer, but we still did this step. With a large flat tool--a squeegie, credit card, etc.--we scraped the paint in several directions. Then we let it dry, which didn't take a long time.

When dry, we tore pieces of collage papers into various sizes. These could be napkins, wrapping paper, tissue, newspaper, magazines. So fun to pick out papers. Then we used matte medium (or Modge Podge) to randomly apply these papers to our painted surface.

Then we used stencils, often trying to unify the painting with these stencils. That part was also fun.

Then we took a single watered down color (usually with Fluid acrylic instead of heavy body) and washed over all the painting. This sometimes unifies the painting or calms down areas.

You can continue this process--paint/collage/stencil--until you are satisfied.

Here are some of the pictures just after the first layers and before adding an image.

Next, dry the painting completely. We used this step to check out the local restaurants for lunch.

The final step is to take a picture we had drawn or enlarged from a drawing, and traced it onto our ground.

**(Ground just means a surface you have created to put a painting on.)

You can use dark or colored graphite paper, since gray will probably not show up much. Some of us freehanded the picture.

Either lighten the background space so the picture comes forward, or lighten where you want to paint the picture. 

Then use a combination of paint/collage/stenciling to bring your image to life. You can add inks, Posca pen, anything you need to enhance your image. 

Here are some of the results: