Donna Zagotta

Donna Zagotta: The You Factor - Powerful, Personal Design in Opaque Watercolor

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Video Length: 2 Hours 34 Minutes
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Discover the most interesting elements from your source material as you mold shapes and relationships to fit your unique vision.

Donna Zagotta's inquisitive approach to design helps you create powerful compositions that say as much about you as they do about your subjects.

In this video workshop, Zagotta breaks her process into manageable steps and approaches design challenges one at a time.

With her design firmly established, she is free to focus on her extended painting process. She concentrates on setting up color relationships and establishing a light pattern. Zagotta mixes an extensive watercolor palette with white gouache. The opaque paints free her to make corrections and solve design problems at any moment and achieve a complex layered effect. Donna develops color, shape, and value relationships until the painting passes her ultimate test: you know its right when you love it!

 

Bonus Clip: "Creative Sketching with Shapes"

In these bonus clips from her video workshop, The You Factor: Powerful, Personal Design in Opaque Watercolor, Donna Zagotta teaches two methods for sketching artistic, personalized designs. First you learn how to create variations on a single shape with contour drawing. Then Donna transforms a street scene composition by emphasizing a round shape motif in all the key objects in the scene.


 

Donna Zagotta, Figurative, Gouache
Active professionally for more than 20 years, Donna Zagotta is a nationally recognized artist, teacher, and juror. Zagotta's paintings have evolved from an early emphasis on traditional watercolor techniques and traditionally influenced realism to an unconventional use of the watercolor medium and the exploration of the area that lies between realism and abstraction. Zagotta has a passion for art history with a special interest in Modernism and finds inspiration in the work of Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, and Richard Diebenkorn. This list includes the master painters who were more focused on expressing color and spatial ideas than in rendering the particulars of subject matter.

 

Watercolor Magazine Article: "Make a Statement" by Donna Zagotta (pdf)

 

Customer Reviews

Based on 6 reviews
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Monique
Donna Zagotta: The You Factor - Powerful Design in Opaque Watercolor

Excellent!

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Monique Lavoie
Donna Zagotta: The You Factor - Powerful Design in Opaque Watercolor

Excellent!

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Mary Duvall
Integrated use of color

Love the way she explains each movement of her brush in using color: all colors in every color is her mantra. I am very intrigued by the look she achieves through careful choice of composition and integrated use of color...can't wait to finish the DVD and review it again and then give it a go in the studio....I think the concepts will transfer to other media as they are universal concepts.

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Anna Marie Pederson
The Gift That Keeps on Giving

I purchased Donna's video, "The You Factor," as a gift to myself before attending her workshop. I love her work and figured that it would be a good way for me to familiarize myself with her process. The video is very helpful---she breaks things down into manageable chunks--- and her workshop was wonderful, but because I am somewhat of a beginner, certain concepts were new to me. I am so glad that I have access to the video, and I am so glad that Donna is such a good teacher! Now I can go back and review those concepts that might otherwise have been lost to me as many times as I need to.

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Shernya Vininsky
YOU, it’s all about you

If there was any chance that I could learn from someone who is attuned to my sensibilities , it is Donna Zagotto. This interview has touched me deeply, as a professional artist making my way through life. I loved the story of her evolution from hobby to painter to teacher. I can relate and somehow have been reminded of some steps I seem to have missed along the way, but inspired to ask myself some important questions . This interview could stand on its own as a learning tool. Just wonderful.