Golden training in New Orleans

Have you ever wondered what all those jars of medium are in the Golden Paint aisle at your art store are for?  I was familiar with several of them, but there were many more I had not worked with.

I was fortunate to be part of a group of 18 artists from around the country to be chosen for Golden's Artist Educator Program (GAEP).  For a week in New Orleans, we worked making sample boards, banners, charts for almost the entire product line of Golden Artist Paints, Inc.

Our instruction was headed by a fantastic team from Golden, including Patti Brady, author of Rethinking Acrylic, with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things acrylic; and Pat Pirrone, whose job included logistics of shipping supplies, setting up hotel accommodations, picking restaurants, and taking care of the needs of all of us.

We worked with High Flow Acrylics (think ink), Open Acrylics (think slow drying), Fluid Acrylics (my favorite), Heavy Body Acrylics (think thick, luscious paste), Iridescent Paints (think metallic shine), and Interference Paints (think two tone light refractive).

There also were many specialty gel and paste mediums to try, such as crackle paste, fiber paste, molding paste, absorbent ground, course pumice gel, glass bead gel, clear tar gel, and gels of varying consistency.

We explored printing on digital grounds, monoprints, Gelli printing plates,  subtractive painting using the open paints, and painting with all the above mediums added to the paint.  We practiced color mixing and made color charts with modern pigments (think translucent, high chroma), and mineral pigments (think opaque, lower chroma).

We added fluid colors to all the iridescent paints, which I KNOW will end up in my future paintings.  My head is still spinning with possibilities for sharing these fantastic painting compounds in my workshops and incorporating them into my own work.

Here I, home in my studio with some of the training materials we made.

Now that I'm home, I can't wait to get started applying some of my newly acquired knowledge to my painting.  Stay tuned.....