The Impressionist Approach: Cotton and Flower Fields, Landscapes, Flowers, and Doorways in Watercolor with Fábio Cembranelli

The Impressionist Approach: Cotton and Flower Fields, Landscapes, Flowers, and Doorways in Watercolor with Fábio Cembranelli

Thursday, Friday & Saturday, October 15, 16 & 17, 2026.
10 AM to 4 PM.
$500, includes lunch on Saturday. Supplies needed.
Appropriate for intermediate artists, as well as more experienced painters.
Number of Students: Max 10.

Check out Fábio Cembranelli's website!

This workshop will guide you in simplifying the complexity of the landscape while capturing the charm of doorways framed in greenery, open fields, and blooming florals. Using small, vibrant strokes placed side by side, you’ll learn how to mix color optically—creating luminous passages of light and movement in a loose, impressionistic style.

Through guided demonstrations and hands-on practice, you’ll explore how to work quickly and confidently, allowing watercolor to do what it does best: glow.

Workshop Topics

• Mixing Greens: Understanding warm and cool variations to create natural, vibrant foliage.

• The Spontaneous Landscape Approach: Learning to lay down a wash — and leave it alone.

• Timing the Dampness: Knowing when to drop thicker paint into wet paper for soft, atmospheric effects.

• Creating Depth: Understanding background, middleground, and foreground relationships.

• Pushing the Horizon Back: Using cool, pale blues and soft edges to keep backgrounds “out of focus.”

• Dry Brush Techniques: Creating texture and sharp contrast.

• Doorways with Greenery & Flowers: Building depth through light and shadow.

• Preserving the White of the Paper: Essential techniques for cotton and flower fields.

• Avoiding Muddy Color: Smart color mixing strategies.

• Negative Painting & Lifting Techniques: Creating luminous white flowers and highlights.

Demonstrations Include

• White flowers

• Expressive landscapes

• Flower fields

• Cotton fields

• A doorway framed with greenery and florals

• Plus multiple sketches and small studies to reinforce key concepts

This workshop is designed to help you loosen up, trust the process, and capture the poetry of light with confidence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fábio Cembranelli, a renowned Brazilian artist, started painting at university, where he studied architecture. His paintings have been featured in exhibitions and collections worldwide and his unique and luminous floral watercolors are known internationally.

Explaining why he has chosen transparent watercolor as his favorite medium, he says, "What compels me to paint with this approach is the possibility of painting quickly. It suits my personality best -- the medium's fluidity provides a unique sensation of unexpected color mixing, particularly when I define only the main masses and allow the unpredictable to happen on the rest of the paper. Timing is quite important in my method. I lean intuitively toward realism, but the right speed forces me to create diffused effects and shapes. I love painting flowers and landscapes in watercolor, and I'm always enchanted by the attempt to capture the contrast between loose and definitive edges, as well as light and shadow effects.”

When he paints, he aims to take the essentials of each subject through his interpretation. It's like a personal subject depiction that will result in a unique work.

Fábio teaches painting techniques in his studio, in art galleries and art societies as well as in-person and online workshops throughout Brazil and abroad.

He also is a regular contributor to several art magazines in South America, the US, the UK, Norway, France, Japan, and Australia, for example.

You can visit www.fabiocembranelli.com for more information about his work.