Review of Susan Scheewe Painting Trees & Leaves DVD Workshop
I bought the DVD a few weeks ago because I like her painting style and how helpful some of her tips in the other VCR tapes / painting books have been for me while learning to paint better watercolors over the years. I watched the workshop this morning - the dog got me up at 5 AM, I couldn’t go back to sleep and decided it was time to clear my drawing table off from the move so I can actually use it to paint with real watercolors again. I found the DVD buried on the bottom layer of my table and started watching it at 7 AM. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she demonstrated how to use frisket (using a good brush - the key is to soap the brush thoroughly first before dipping it into the frisket plus cleaning it & re-soaping it during the process) AND she showed using the white texture medium as well as tinting it - gave me a great idea for a snow painting … now all I have to do is get some frisket & texture medium to try what I learned this morning.
Another reminder of something I know but tend to forget since I paint so many palm trees instead of oaks or maples etc … it is a great idea to leave blank spots when drawing your your tree trunks - that way you can have foliage there without a tree trunk showing thru the foliage - many trees have bits & pieces of trunk showing - not the entire trunk. In oil, it is easy enough to cover those up … in watercolor - they can show through way too easily and ruin a great painting unless you find a way to solve the problem.
She was also giving do’s & don’ts … and how to solve problems from doing some of those don’ts if you did it before thinking about it. Problem solving in watercolor painting is quite unique to watercolors I’ve found - those accidents are not necessarily going to turn out to be happy accidents unless you decipher a way to work around things that happen … it was a nice reminder to me also that it is too much water on the brush that generally causes those backruns that I do not want happening most of the time 
Those backruns have their place and work great in some areas, like for tree bark or perhaps some fine clouds or perhaps water ripples … but they look awful in the middle of a pond going the wrong directions.
The cost was quite reasonable and well worth the price. I enjoyed the workshop and no matter that I have been painting in watercolors for several years now … I still do not know everything by any means. Everything was not new to me … much was a great reminder of things I already know but much of it was new and gave me new ideas of how to create different effects in my watercolor paintings. I’d give it a 10 on a scale of 1 - 10. 3 hrs is a long time but the time flew by while I was watching it so I didn’t really notice how much time it was taking from my day. Be sure to plan for those 3 hours though when you watch it. I knew that Sunday morning with no major plans for the day was a good time and being up so early - I got a head start and still have plenty of daylight for painting today.
Tags: Barbara Burns, Palm Tree Ballet #1, Imagekind, Watercolor, DVD Watercolor Workshop Review
