Five opportunities to study with me

And for my workshops, there are early-bird discounts available!

Four Ducks, by Carol L. Douglas. There are so many ways to paint water!

“There’s no phone reception out on the ocean,” I casually mentioned to my electrical-engineer husband. He immediately outlined a low-cost plan to extend coverage offshore. I looked at him in wonder. “Please don’t. That’s the best thing about sailing!”

I leave this evening for my last workshop of the season, aboard schooner American Eagle. (As many times as I see her, I still have a crush on that boat.) I’ve had so many inquiries about upcoming classes and workshops that I pulled them all together for you before leaving.
How to paint water: I’m speaking to the Waterville Art Society on Thursday, October 3 on how to paint water. The meeting starts at 6 PM at Chace Community Forum, 150 Main Street, Waterville, ME. For more information, email here.
Dennis Pollock, right before he went for a swim during our weekly painting class. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Johnson.)
Our next mid-coast Maine painting classes start on Tuesday, October 22. These classes meet on Tuesday mornings from 10-1, and this session runs six weeks, from October 22 to November 26.
This is primarily a plein air class.  Autumn is a fantastic time to paint in mid-coast Maine, as it stays warmer here longer than inland. When weather permits, we paint at locations in the Rockport-Rockland-Camden area. When the weather turns, we meet in my studio at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport. For more information, see here, or register here. (If you’re a returning student, you can just email me.)
Painting aboard schooner American Eagle with Diane Fulkerson, Mary Ellen Pedersen, and Lynne Twentyman.
I’ll be teaching two watercolor sketch workshops aboard the historic schooner American Eagle next year. The first is during the opening run of the Maine windjammer fleet and includes the Gam, the annual fleet raft-up. That’s June 7-11. The second, from September 20-24, is timed for the coast’s peak foliage season.
All materials—and they’re professional grade—are included, and if you want, you can help with the sailing too. More information is here.
Rebecca Bense and me, at Sea & Sky on Schoodic Point. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Johnson.)
Last, but certainly not least, is my annual Sea & Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute. It’s an opportunity to study painting in America’s oldest national park, surrounded by breathtaking nature, but insulated from the ‘madding crowds’.
This workshop is five days long and includes all meals and accommodations. This year we’ve added a commuter option as well. This workshop was waitlisted last year, and for good reason—it’s a fun and informative time, open to students in oils, pastels, watercolor, gouache or acrylic. More information can be found here.
Ellen Trayer and Lynne Twentyman, painting on a deserted island.
All of my workshops include an Early-Bird discountfor those of you signing up before January 1. (Workshops, of course, make great Christmas gifts for the painters in your life.) If you have any questions, you can email me.
I won’t be able to answer until next week, of course, because in a few hours I’m throwing my rope-soled shoes and duffle-bag in the car and heading down to the harbor. That also means no blog on Friday. Fair winds and following seas to you, and I’ll see you on Monday.

Beautiful boats and how they stay that way

Invented by a Scottish shipwright, the marine railway operates almost unchanged two hundred years later.
Packing oakum, by Carol L. Douglas
This is the first year in a while that I won’t be painting through fit-out, the annual renovation of the Maine windjammer fleet. I leave for Scotland on Monday. By the time I return they’ll be mostly finished.
The windjammer fleet is annually hauled out of the water according to a very loose schedule, written in longhand and pinned to the wall of the office at North End Shipyard. These boats are very big and very old. They spend nearly all their lives in the water, where they’re prey to worms, barnacles, and other underwater stinkers. They need regular repainting and occasional replanking. The Coast Guard carefully inspects their nether regions as well.
Setting blocks, by Carol L. Douglas
The marine railway, or patent slipway, was invented by a Scottish shipwright in 1818. Thomas Mortonwas looking for a cheaper, faster way of dry-docking boats in his Leith boatyard. As with so many brilliant ideas, his plan was deceptively simple. A boat would be secured to a wooden cradle while still floating in the water. This cradle would then be raised up a set of rails—the slipway—to dry land. A block and tackle arrangement would give a mechanical advantage, but the hoisting power came from men and mules.
Big-boned (Heritage), by Carol L. Douglas
With the advent of steam power, a donkey engine replaced the living horsepower. Today it’s an old, repurposed diesel engine. Other than that, however, the railway at North End Shipyard could be from anytime in the last two hundred years.
While some of the work now involves air compressors and Bondo, there’s a lot of it that’s straight out of the past as well. Hulls are still caulked with oakum and a long caulking mallet. Paint is scraped away and then replaced with brushes, and the Coast Guard laboriously walks the length of the hull pinging every plank with a hammer to search out rot.
Striping (Captain Linda Lee), by Carol L. Douglas
In most cases, the boats are out of the water only a few days. Sometimes the work they need barely outlasts a tide cycle. Conversely, the crew can find work that’s so extensive that they can’t get back in the water for a week or longer. Or weather can prevent hauling. Hence the vagaries of the schedule.
Those few days out of the water are hardly all the work that’s done every year on these boats. Their tenders were repaired and refinished in sheds over the winter; so too were the wooden blocks (pulleys) that the lines run through. Under their plastic covers, decks have been refinished, and repairs have been made to the below-deck accommodation for passengers. The masts are greased so the hoops can travel freely, and ratlines are retarred.
Coast Guard Inspection, by Carol L. Douglas
Everything above the waterline will be painted from floats. The Coast Guard will make sure that all the lifesaving equipment works and that the crew knows how to use it. It’s an intense, laborious process, all so these beautiful vessels can parade proudly for five months a year.
Despite the immense usefulness of his invention, Thomas Morton did not get stinking rich. He earned a total of £5737 in royalties and a lump sum of £2500 from the House of Commons. That made his total profit around a million modern US dollars—not much, considering how widely the marine railway is still used today. Perhaps when I’m in Edinburgh, I will search out his old shipyard and give a nod to one of the many inventions through which the Scots changed the modern world.
There are still a few openings in my sketch-watercolor workshop aboard the schooner American Eagle, June 9-13, 2019. This is a class to learn how to catch landscape quickly and expressively in watercolor, pen and pencil. And my annual Sea & Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park has had a cancellation; I’m dying to know who’s going to take that last spot. For more information, email me.

Locking it in

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!

 Watercoloring at Schoodic Point with Rebecca Bense.
Sometimes, the people who struggle in painting class are the ones you’d least expect to have trouble. They’re accomplished in their professional life, and they’ve demonstrated the capacity to master complex subjects quickly.
That proficiency can be their undoing. When they don’t immediately understand the process, they’re flummoxed. Understand ideas helps, but it’s not everything. They have to learn another way of learning—grasping an idea from the hands, not the head.
The critic may understand all the elements that make a good painting, but it’s unlikely that he or she can paint or draw anything. The working artist may understand none of those things, but is still able to make enchanting paintings. It’s all about where they’ve concentrated their effort.
It’s not all about what the teacher says; it’s mostly about what you do with that information.
You’ll do better in a workshop or class if you aim to enjoy the process, rather than focus on the end result. You can’t expect perfection in a week. The more time you spend working on art, the better you’ll be.
In my classes, I concentrate on one aspect of painting each session. I’m limiting the scope of the project. Painting involves so many complex skills and techniques that if they were all thrown at us at once, we’d be overwhelmed. If you’re teaching yourself, you need to find ways to limit scope on your own. Choose one or two things that you want to improve—such as your color handling or mark-making—and concentrate on just those until you’ve made them better. Then move on to the next thing.
Painting buddies on Penobscot Bay.
A painting buddy is a great asset, as a coach, a sounding board, and for moral support. I love the interactions in my classes, because they’re uniformly positive. In most cases, people really do wish their friends the best.
Gaye Adamshas some shrewd advice about practice: “It is important to lock in the learning. Recognize that workshops shorten the learning curve, which is awesome, but they are not a substitute for easel time.”
It’s difficult to paint for a short time every day, because of the set up and clean up. However, you can always carry a sketchbook and draw. Drawing is the single best thing you can do to improve your painting, and it’s fun. Save the painting for those periods when you have a few hours of uninterrupted time.
Painting aboard American Eagle last summer.
Sometimes we need more support than can be offered by practice alone. In that case, a teacher is very helpful. Check out their class size, the work being done by their students, and—above all—if they’re painting in a style that pleases you.
My own August workshop at Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park is sold out. However, there are still a few openings in my sketch-watercolor workshop aboard the schooner American Eagle, June 9-13, 2019. This is a class to learn how to catch landscape quickly and expressively in watercolor, pen and pencil. Materials are provided. For more information, see here, or email me for more information.

Try not to bankrupt your students, fellow teachers

We should remember that pinch in the pocketbook when we draw up our supply lists.
Plastic wrap, by Carol L. Douglas. I can paint without cadmium yellow or cadmium red, but not without cadmium orange.

During my absence last week, one of my students took a workshop with another painter, an excellent artist I quite admire. Studying with other teachers is good practice. It reinforces what is essential. And since every teacher has ideas that are simple preference, it helps put those in perspective, too.

Before she went, we spent time talking over the supply list. A student should go into a class with the materials the teacher has requested; otherwise she is hobbled from the beginning. On the other hand, I have had too much experience to not be skeptical of supply lists, which often include everything but the kitchen sink.
True to form, she came back with three or four unopened tubes of paint. I really wish teachers would stop doing that. It’s expensive and its irresponsible.
Teachers should strive to help students navigate through color space. This was a class exercise by Jennifer Johnson.
I moved a tube of Cadmium Green around for years. It currently lists at $24.95 for 37 ml. It’s a great color for the sallow greens in skin tones, but an effect that can easily be approximated with black and yellow. I was painfully poor the year I took that class, but we never touched the tube.
I’ve come to feel the same way about Cerulean Blue in oil painting. It’s a heavy, dense blue that sells for $34.95 for 37 ml. I learned to paint skies with it, and there is nothing more luscious. Still, skies can be painted quite adequately with Ultramarine or Prussian Blue, which cost exactly a third of what Cerulean costs. 
However, because it’s dense and opaque, Cerulean Blue occupies a niche in watercolor that can’t be easily filled by other pigments; hence it stays on my watercolor palette.
Cobalt violet is beautiful but hardly indispensable.
Cobalt Violet is another very pricey pigment that can be approximated at a fraction of the cost. Note that I said “approximated,” rather than mixed. You can’t mix a respectable Cerulean Blue or Cobalt Violet hue. (For an explanation of hues and other arcana of paint tubes, see here.) You can only learn ways to paint with less expensive pigments. When possible, that should be the starting point for the teacher. Let your students shop for their Cadillacs on their own.
Our responsibility is more than just financial. We have a duty to train up new artists in safe, environmentally-friendly techniques. All three of the colors I mentioned above are toxic inorganic pigments. They’re harmless as paint, unless you eat or bathe in the stuff. The problem lies in their manufacture (and, to a lesser extent, their disposal). There’s only one plant currently making cadmium pigments in the US, under our strict environmental and worker-safety controls. That means the pigments in your paint are probably coming from offshore, and we have no idea if the process is safe or not.
It’s nearly impossible to clear all the inorganic pigments off our paint-tray, but we can minimize their use. My palette still contains cadmium orange, I’m afraid, because I’ve never found an analog that answers.
Part of my goal is to teach people to mix colors rather than buy them.
Then there is the question of substrates. Most beginning students are fine with cheap boards, with the caveat that once they start selling work, they need to move up to an archival-quality board. The problem is in the backing, and that’s an issue for future conservators, not for painting class. When I was a student, we worked as often on gessoed paper as on canvases. There is absolutely no reason to make your students buy archival boards for value exercises.
The exception to this is in watercolor and pastel. In both cases, the substrate is as important as the pigment. But even here, one can buy decent-quality student products.
The flip side of this is the teacher who’s afraid to tell his or her students what to buy at all. I find it’s helpful to just list what you carry and work from there, being mindful that some things are just preference, not necessities. Be specific—if you want sanded pastel paper, specify that, for example. But don’t be so specific as to be restrictive. If a student is using a phthalo blue, there’s no point in having him replace it with Prussian blue. They function in the same niche.
Here are my supply lists:
I’m happy to share them with painting students and as a template for teachers to create their own supply lists, but please don’t copy them without credit!

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

Monday Morning Art School: How to make time to make art

Having trouble finding time to get anything done? We all are.

Commit to working with others, either in a class, a group, or a workshop. It will jumpstart your process.

These days, I’m turning over my guest room as fast as the Starlight Motel down the street is turning over theirs. Not well, I might add; my brother tells me I’m in danger of losing my five-star rating. Even though I strongly discourage guests in the high season, there are still people whom I want to see.


Not having enough time to make art isn’t a unique problem. It’s something I hear from other artists in every station of life. Jobs, children, parents, spouses or homes aren’t time-killers; they’re the very fabric of our lives. Still, too often we go to bed realizing we’ve done no actual artwork that day.
Schedule studio time. If you work at the same time every day, you spend less mental energy waiting for inspiration to kick in—you just dive in and do it. That’s more than a mental trick. Your body and mind crave routine. Working on art at the same time every day makes it easier to transition into the flow zone.
Take a class. They’re fun, social, advance your skills, and—just like joining the gym—you have money riding on your involvement.
Keep the set-up to a minimum. I keep my palettes in the freezer so I can paint in small increments. I sometimes work in watercolor when I don’t have time to set up in oils. I draw when I can’t do either.
I’ve been recording the passing scene in sketchbooks forever. I wasn’t always kind.
Put down your cell phone and pick up your sketchbook. Draw in meetings, classes and church—it won’t lower your comprehension much. I’ve written about the importance of sketching many times; it separates good artists from mediocre ones.
Make work a habit. Set aside a half hour a day and use it to make some kind of art. You really can cement a habit by doing it for a month.
A small amount of time with a sketchbook can yield wonderful results.

Cut out the screen time. Even with the decline in TV watching, Americans average about eleven hours a day in front of some kind of screen. You might find that all the time you need to make art can be found just by deleting the Facebook app. (Just be sure to subscribe to this blog before you do it! The sign up box is at the top right.)
Make a studio. If you don’t have a room to dedicate to art, make a studio in a corner of your bedroom or some other underutilized space. Having a dedicated, organized work space cuts down on the set-up time each time you want to work.
Find a corner somewhere where you can leave your project up.
Make art a social activity. Join a figure-drawing or plein air group. There’s accountability in committing to work with someone else.
Run away from home.Apply for a residency somewhere. Even a week of focused work, sans family, can be great for your development. I’ll be doing one at the Joseph Fiore Art Center this September.
The dreaded deadline. I hesitate to recommend this, even though the best way I know to chain myself to my easel is to commit work for a show. Yes, deadlines make you finish things. However, they’re corrosive to body and soul. Better to just develop good work practices.
Be patient with yourself
I had cancer at age 40. Since then health issues have played a much larger role in my life. I’m always infuriated by being sick, because I like to keep busy. But if you’ve just had a baby or are recovering from pneumonia, you’re not going be efficient. Be patient. Just as you have to walk a little farther every day to regain fitness, you need to slowly reform your work schedule.
I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

Thinking about teaching?

You might be an excellent painter, but make sure you understand your own process thoroughly. 

Me,teaching at Acadia National Park
I started writing Monday Morning Art School back in October. This was in response to my students’ need for continuing education while I was elsewhere. It was also a way to put my scattershot “how to” posts in some kind of framework.
It takes longer than the posts I write the rest of the week, and it’s more complicated. It does funny things to my readership stats as well: Monday Morning Art School gets fewer hits than any other day of the week, but I get more mail about it than about anything else.
The difficult thing about writing a “how to” is slicing and dicing your process. That’s true of teaching in general. It’s one thing to know how to do something, and another to be able to stand outside your work and explain it step-by-step to a beginner. In a classroom, you read your students’ reactions and adjust your method accordingly. Writing (or video) is a one-way street.
Painting by student Catherine Bullinger in a one-day workshop last summer.
A friend took drawing classes at a prestigious art school. I’ve wondered how a person with her mind could manage to not learn to draw in such a setting, but she did. She’s a brilliant woman. Drawing should have been a snap for her.
As I was writing about measuring curves as a series of straight line segments, I asked her if she’d ever been taught this simple skill. “The teacher was a wonderful botanical illustrator herself, but really in retrospect her teaching method was: ‘look at it and sketch it,’” she told me.
I’ve taken a few classes and workshops with great artists who couldn’t teach. At times the instructor thought that watching him paint was enough. No questions were allowed during the demo. That’s a real misunderstanding of the teacher’s role. His focus should be on describing and examining his process, not protecting it.
Students painting at Owls Head.
Anyway, if I wanted to watch someone paint, I’d have just bought the video.
Almost all artists get the idea somewhere along the way that they can teach, especially after their accountants tut-tut over their books. Many artists teach wonderfully, of course, and the world needs more people like them.
Others may be excellent painters, but haven’t analyzed their process thoroughly. Or, worse, they don’t have the communication skills to interact with strangers.
Yes, I demo, but there’s a lot more to teaching than that.
Before you decide to run that class, run a check on yourself as you start and finish a painting. Can you clearly describe all aspects of your process, or is some of it automatic and mysterious even to you? If the latter, do yourself and your students a favor and hold off on teaching until you’ve got it straight in your mind.
This, by the way, is a lesson I learned the hard way.

A few questions (and answers) about plein air painting in Maine

Yes, there are bathrooms. We like to call them ‘heads’ on a boat
Jonathan Submarining, by Carol L. Douglas

If you’ve been thinking about taking my Sea & Skyor Age of Sailworkshops, this is a reminder that you have only two weeks left to get an early-bird discount. That’s $50 off the price of the boat trip or $100 off the Acadia workshop.

The Age of Sail is June 10-14, 2018 on the historic schooner American Eagle out of Rockland, ME. Sea & Sky is August 5-10 at Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park. Here are some questions I’ve been asked recently:

Drying sails, by Carol L. Douglas

What do you do if it rains?

While the rain in Maine falls mainly on the plain, it does sometimes rain over Penobscot Bay and the ocean. American Eagle has a canopy over the main deck for when the boat is at anchor, and we’ll use that. At Schoodic, we have access to a pavilion. In either case, if the worst happens and we’re totally unable to work outside, there are interior places where we can gather.
Are there bathrooms?
Yes and no. On a boat, a toilet is more properly called ‘the head.’ Although American Eagle is a restored heritage boat, she does have these modern conveniences. Schoodic Institute does, too.
On the boat, you’ll sleep in a berth. At Schoodic, you’ll have a room in an apartment with a kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and access to laundry facilities. Out in the woods, we either drive to the nearest park facility, or we take an amble into the woods like the locals (bear, moose, and foxes) do.
Outrunning the Storm, Carol L. Douglas
Are these workshops handicapped-access?
Schoodic Institute is, but let me know if you have physical limitations when you register. Our painting locations are all accessible by car and involve little hiking, so you won’t miss out. American Eagle is not accessible. It was built as a working fishing boat.
What about food?
In both cases, all meals are provided, so you don’t have to worry about where and when you eat. Schoodic’s chefs prepare lunches and snacks for us to take into the field, and we have breakfast and dinner cafeteria-style. American Eagle’s cook and mess-mate feed us three squares a day on deck.
Both trips include a lobster boil. Schoodic’s is prepared by a fisherman from nearby Corea, ME, who hauls that day’s catch over to us. On American Eagle, you’re likely to see Captain John Foss row his dinghy into a nearby harborage to buy seafood off the dock. You’re encouraged to make dinghy jokes.
An island lobster bake, in progress.
Can I get a glass of wine?
You can bring some along. In Maine wine and liquor are sold in grocery stores, and you can easily pick some up along the way.
What about black flies or mosquitoes?
I’ve painted in the far north from northern Alaska to Labrador, and the worst black flies I ever did see were at Piseco Lake in New York. They’re an early-summer phenomenon, which is why we’ll be out on the water in June and on land in August.
Watercolor field sketches, by Carol L. Douglas
What equipment should we bring?
For Sea & Sky, all mediums are welcome. Here are my packing lists for oils, acrylicsand watercolor. The Age of Sail is a little different. I’m supplying everything, and we’re going to work in field-sketch style in watercolor and gouache, the better to capture fast impressions.
A reader once posted this comment on my blog: “Noted watercolor painter John Marin of the Maine coast not only painted many boats but also painted from a boat. He rowed out from Mt. Desert Island where he sketched and painted quick minutes-long watercolors while bobbing in his rowboat. One was on display at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art this past summer… Mount Desert Minute Drawing, most likely a view of Cadillac Mountain, and can be seen on this web page