Life has been busy, I have been somewhat exhausted, so I haven’t kept up with posting as I intended. Only 2 classes left, so I wanted to give a little update now.
This would have been the thing to mention in the first post, but for this class we had a very short list of required supplies:
- Four tubes of acrylic paint: Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Red Light, and white.
- Two medium size paint brushes
- One 8.5 x 11 sketch pad (I actually used a 9×12 acrylic pad that I already had)
For the first 2 classes, we did not use the white at all. We practiced mixing red, blue and yellow, and worked on how to create contrast and highlights with just those colors.
Week two we painted a bunch of fruit:
Trying to paint that red delicious apple, I found that the Cadmium Red Light was actually too orange. The instructor ended up giving me a more purple-y red to fix my apple.
I went home and experimented with two other red shads that I had, to see which would give me a better purple. I also started looking at fruits and vegetables as possible props for still life paintings. Unfortunately, I do not really have a good set up for still life work in my painting area, so that is something I am now thinking about.
Week 3 I swapped my light red for a medium red. We started working with the white paint, and spent most of the class mixing colors and shades to fill in another color wheel. We had a short time at the end of the class to work on another still life, but I really didn’t feel like I managed to do enough in the time I had (I am a very slow painter).
Last Sunday, which was week 4, we arrived to see a list on our table, with instructions to choose some items to compose a still life.
This is what my table-mate and I chose. The photo was actually taken at the end of the class. The light changed toward the end, there was more sun coming in, which made everything brighter.
And I ended up with this painting. I was near the end of our time, starting the try and do the blue cloth, and the instructor said why didn’t I go back and keep working on the wooden carving, because I had done a good job on shading so far. I commented that I was trying to finish and she said that “sometimes a painting becomes about one thing.” So, I abandoned the cloth and went back to the wood figure.
I snapped the above photo of our still life arrangement at the end, thinking that maybe I could go back and work on the rest later, and I still may. But once I got it home, and had a look at it the next day, I could see what she meant. It’s all about practice, and experimenting, and I ended up being pretty happy with how the wooden figure came out; it looks more finished than anything else.
This week, we will be working on a landscape. A little bit scared, and a little bit nervous. But, all in all, glad that I decided to do this!