Taos Workshop

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Yesterday I opened registration for my Taos Watercolor Workshop in May 2027 and it is already filling up. We headquarter at the historic Mabel Dodge Luhan House and this is a corner of the lodge that leads around to the outdoor cafe. The sunlight hits on different parts of the rambling adobe buildings and there is no end to the painting possibilities. Giant cottonwoods and ancient pines are growing all around the lodge adding to the high desert charm.

I started with the wall on the left with a mixture of yellow ochre and cobalt violet. Paint application is always important and you can see how i used a lighter value for the sunny areas and a darker value for the shadows and cast shadows. Also notice how I used pressure with my brush and a darker version of the mixture to create texture on the adobe. For the cottonwood trees I combined lemon yellow with cerulean blue and added olive green and perylene green for the darker areas. The combination of hard and soft edges adds thickness and keeps the trees from looking flat. The dark trunk and branches are a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.

Perylene green mixed with burnt sienna was used for the evergreen tree on the right and you can see how the perylene green dominated the mixture for the branches and burnt sienna dominated the mixture for the trunk. For the adobe building I again mixed cobalt violet with yellow ochre and then added mineral violet for the shadow side. You can see how I painted the building in three values and even the shadow areas are full of color. The flagstones and rocks were painted with gray mixed with cerulean blue and orange. When I look at this painting now I can envision the famous Taos sunlight and that was one of my objectives. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton