Demo by Beki Borman at Milwaukee Sketch Club 5/12/09

Beki Borman gave an excellent demo. http://www.bekiborman.com/

She generally starts with a gestural drawing. Then she starts her painting by looking at both her drawing and photograph. As the painting progresses she reacts to what it's doing and less to her reference material.

She demonstrated her mixed media technique starting with watercolor. She pours on her color and moves it around with a big 3"? flat brush, then lets it dry. Sometimes she puts salt or alcohol on to create texture. She works the negative spaces in the background along with her form.

Her 140# arches is taped (masking tape, 2 rows) to a board but not wet and stretched before hand. (Joyce, a watercolorist in our club buys homasote board from home depot or menards, has them cut it in 1/2, then one piece into 1/4. The 1/2 piece fits a full sheet of watercolor paper. She then soaks/ wets her paper and staples it to his board. To flatten her watercolors she mists the back lightly, then layers as follows: plexiglass, papertowel, artwork facedown, papertowels, plexiglass, weights(books). She changes her papertowels twice and her artwork dries in a day.)

Next media she uses is watercolor pencil. She uses Reeves and dark turquoise pencils from Michaels. She likes the turquoise pencils because they're soft. I have tried 2 kinds of watercolor pencils, prismacolor and carandache. I like carandache because the colors are really intense and they're pretty soft. Someone likes Lyra.

Then she'll come in with regular color pencil. (She started with green scheme, came in with brown, then started using red complement. She keeps an idea of her color scheme in her head and doesn't necessarily follow real life color.) She uses prismacolor and progresso from Michaels. She likes progresso because they are very soft.

Then she'll go in with gouche which is very flat and opaque. She usually mixing it with a little watercolor and water. Generally uses white, sometimes black. Although black has a bluish cast to it so she prefers to use ink.

Sometimes she'll add pastels. Occasionally will add gum arabic (watercolor medium) to make a wash and go over a piece to add a sheen but it picks up gouche and watercolor pencil. Sometimes she uses masking fluid which she applies with an old brush or bamboo pen. (Joyce uses a good brush, wets it first, uses it 3 times, then rinses it. Masking Fluid dries fast and you have to keep rinsing it out or it will ruin your brush.) When she was doing her forest series she used masking regular masking tape to mask out areas in her paintings.

She likes SB framing gallery in Milwaukee's 3rd ward. http://www.sbframinggallery.com/ and also likes Niki Russos in Deerfield WI.