Missy Dunaway is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Maine. Her work, created with acrylic ink on paper, combines painting with research to explore intersections of art, literature, history, and the natural world.

She earned a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 and later received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Turkey, where she studied early Anatolian textiles. This work informed a series of paintings exhibited internationally and led to the publication of her sketchbooks in The Traveling Artist: A Visual Journal (2021).

Her current project, The Birds of Shakespeare, combines painting with archival research to explore every bird species referenced in Shakespeare’s works. She is a recipient of a Folger Institute Fellowship and contributed a series of twenty-two essays to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog, Shakespeare & Beyond. Her work has been featured by Smithsonian magazine, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and the National Audubon Society.

JANUARY 23
Painting Feathers of All Kinds

This lesson explores the versatility of acrylic ink through painting a variety of feathers from life. White paint is worked in opaque layers to render stripes and dots on dark feathers. Diluting acrylic ink with water, offers possibilities for creating delicate layers of value that mimic the airy textures of downy feathers. The session ends with a parrot feather using wet-into-wet blending to create beautiful gradients of color.

Acrylic-ink, like most pigment-based inks, has highly saturated color, and the class will demonstrate how to take advantage of this by painting the bright turquoise of crow eggs. I will demonstrate texture-building and distressing techniques to illustrate the eggs inside a ragged nest. Unlike the first class, which focused on objects floating on a white page, this painting exercise is designed to expand students’ skills to render overlapping forms.

MARCH 27
Branches and Blooms

The final lesson focuses on how to combine the techniques developed throughout the series and apply them to a more complex subject: flowering branches. I will demonstrate how to use dip pens alongside brushes to expand your toolset and add more options for creativity. Bleeding techniques and transparent layers permit creation of soft, luminous petals. Opaque paint, distressing methods, and linear mark-making with dip pens offer possibilities to describe branches and leaves.

 - Series 2 Artists Classroom Student

 - Series 1 Artists Classroom Student

 - Series 2 Artists Classroom Student

 - Series 1 Artists Classroom Student