Taste of Life – Garlic. Oil Painting Workshop with Vira Ustianska

Learn to see color inside white while painting garlic on a dark background and practicing value, temperature, light, and form. Join me for Taste of Life – Garlic, a 3-hour oil painting workshop on October 11, 2–5 PM at Liberty Station, 2750 Historic Decatur Road, Suite 206, San Diego. We’ll paint a white garlic bulb against a dark background — one of my favorite exercises for discovering how much color can exist inside “white.” Cool blue-grays, warm creams, pinks, ochres and reflected tones all come together to create light, volume and atmosphere. During the workshop, I’ll guide you step by step from a small compositional and tonal sketch to the finished painting. We’ll work with value relationships, warm and cool color, transparent underpainting, light and shadow, edges, texture and form — always moving from large masses to smaller details. The dark background gives us the widest tonal range, making it easier to understand how light shapes an object and how subtle shifts in color create depth.