Hello fellow artist and a healthy and rewarding New Year to you all.

      We have been doing a great deal at Signilar and have 4 new DVDs in the pipe line: Basic Drawing for the Portrait, Plein Air Landscape: Shadow and Light, Plein Air Landscape: Clouds and Sea, Still life Painting: Bull with Fruit. All of the last three were shot on location at our workshop site in San Juan, Puerto Rico so they all have amazing light effects. They are all in pastel with master painter Judith Carducci... Let me say right here, Judith is a superb painter and it makes no difference to me that she uses pastel and I use oil. Her technique works for any medium. She simply has so many lessons to give and hints and ideas to express, I'm sure she will be doing videos with us for a long while. She was voted the most popular teacher at the Portrait Society of America's April conference last year. She is certainly the one I am learning the most from now. And, she is fun, friendly and interesting.

     The first one I mentioned, Basic Drawing for the Portrait, features Dianne Aeschliman. This is a first for us, but we felt it very important that beginner portrait painters learn the basic configuration of the skull and head. Dianne has really easy ways to check your drawing and easy methods for drawing with charcoal and eraser. She has a 20 year background teaching at the Lyme Academy in Conn. and is also very warm and assuring. It is a wonderful DVD and will serve well to teach the basics of portrait drawing. Welcome on board, Dianne!

       We will be running the workshops again this fall, 2010 and will put up information shortly. The group who went down this year had a ball...And, we did some darn good paintings, too. We'll try to put up some of those on the Signilar site as well. It was a really great time...especially to spend so much time with so many good painters.

       I hope to have a few more tips and bits later in the month so stay tuned. We keep trying to do things a little better and to offer you more and more information and ideas. I hope shortly that we will have some of the art work of our masters available on line, as well.

       In any case ...

            happy painting and stay in touch.