Pictures from the Jef Dirig Egg Emulsion Watercolor Workshop.

Attending were Howard Margolis, Penny Boeckmann, Bev McManimie, Donita Woodcock, Stephen Hughes, Patty Hughes, a young friend of Jef’s, Michael, who is also a helper in the studio and Arlene Wright-Correll.

Jef put an assortment of items on our worktable. You can see the stuffed owl I used for my subject. In the above picture you can see Jef instructing Stephen Hughes who is using a wood planer for his subject.

Patty Hughes used a whale Vertebrae for her subject.

Howard Margolis used a conch shell, while Bev McManimie used a small wiffle tree.

You see Jef’s studio helper Micheal using a small horse for his subject. Penny Boeckmann used a small wooden crab as her subject and Donita used a turtle shell for hers.

Jef started his workshop with commentary on different works of art on his studio walls and then we watched him working on one of his paintings for about a half hour as he answered questions and showed the techinque of working with the egg emulsion.

Then he gave each of the students a blank 5 x 7″ 300 pound rag water color paper. Amazingly 5 of the 7 students had never done a water color painting and 1 of those 5 had never drawn anything or painted anything. We worked with 3 colors of paint and the results were amazing and totally gratifying.

One of the secrets of this technique is basically the scraping away of any part of the watercolor painting that had the egg emulsion on it. The scraping was done with a scaple. 

We also learned values and the technique of basically not drawing hardly anything when we started our paintings.

I do believe that everyone went home knowing how to continue using this technique of painting. I also believe each of us went away with a small painting worthy of framing.

This was an excellent workshop, a good value, with all materials provided, excellent and enthusiastic instruction plus a pizza lunch break. 

I am also sure that Avalon Stained Glass School will be giving this workshop again in the near future and should anyone be interested please email me at askarlene@scrtc.com