Fealing Lin

The National Watercolor Society hosted a demonstration today with Fealing Lin.  The new gallery was a great spot for the full-house crowd who came to see this internationally recognized NWS signature artist. It was interesting to learn that Fealing was originally a dentist from Taiwan.  Besides being an outstanding watercolorist, she has a delightful personality.  www.fealingwatercolor.com

Fealing used a hot-press block for her portrait, which was taken from one of her Renaissance Fair photos. While using local color as a basis, she identifies the subtle warms and cools to lay in a variety of colors as a tinted background.  Using her "Sean Connery" model of facial planes, she carves out the features by changing temperature or value as the planes change. Subsequent layers keep warms over warms and cools over cools in most cases.  Fealing beautifully linked and opened passages into each other through lost edges.  I found it enlightening to see how she made shadows and their larger shapes. Rather than lay in a literal "shadow-colored shape", she moved through the shape adding darker colors of the local color.

"Beyond Melody and Poetry"

This demonstration was inspiring and quickened my inner enthusiasm for painting people.  I thoroughly enjoyed my first full workshop ever with Ted Nuttall and saw similarities in their approaches. Fealing Lin gave an excellent demonstration, and I cannot wait to see the completion of the painting!!  With apologies for the flash glare and poor photo quality, the picture to the right  shows her recent work that was juried into the 2010 National Watercolor Society Annual Exhibition.  She is one of the contributing artists to the Northlight book Watercolor Secrets by Rachel Rubin Wolf.   Her self-portrait is featured on the cover of the book. http://www.northlightshop.com/product/watercolor-secrets