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How much is that doggie in the window?

Layers, layers, layers. Let your brush find the form. Use your smaller round brushes and build your form with layers of varying color and value to create texture. Think with your brush! Great job on all of your paintings. Very cute puppies!

Whatever Floats Your Boat

I love this painting. I love the boat, the sand, the hot hot sun, everything. And everyone did such a grand job with this painting, I am thrilled. It was a lot of fun, and it's interesting to see how little it takes to make the boats convincing. A little lighter on one side of the boat, a bit of a dark line in the shadow where the boat meets the sand, letting that shadow creep up the hull, and voila! Nicely done, ladies, and welcome back to Eileen, Connie, Jane, Lynne, and Marsha!

Martin's Magnolia

We started the evening discussing color families and mixing colors inside and outside the color families. I will post a tutorial about that soon so you have a visual to refer to. Then we worked on a painting of a magnolia by Martin Johnson Heade. Getting the subtle shading of a white flower was difficult! We started with a warm cream white and darkened it with its compliment for the shading. We tried mixing a pile of paint to three values, but that didn't go well. I think most of us ended up using one of the mixed values as a base color and then altering it on the canvas for the other values. In the end, it worked out pretty well. Many very nice paintings tonight.

Welcome back, Karen, we missed you! And, welcome, Igor! Glad to have you visit our class. Enjoy your stay. 

TMI!

WAY too much info for one class. We learned so much tonight that we didn't finish our paintings. We learned about clouds, mountains and rocks, highlighting mountains and rocks, pine trees, and we were going to work on reflections, but we ran out of time. But, the journey is more valuable than the destination, and what s journey it was! We made up our own composition and populated it with our own objects. I'll be working on my painting over the next week so I can show you some more of the techniques and you can finish your paintings at home.

Great job tonight!

Evil trees

Sometimes I am truly surprised by which paintings prove the most frustrating. That just shows how much I have to learn as an instructor. There was quite a struggle in the classroom tonight. We dealt with shadows that we thought were too fat,  too thin, too opaque, too transparent, colors that we thought were too blue, too pink, too gray, too bright.... You name it, we struggled with it. I've been thinking about why. It's isn't that we can't mix color, every student in the class mixes successful color every week. It isn't that we can't make trees or shadows, we manipulate our brushes to do our bidding every week. I truly believe that it was the stark simplicity of the photo that made everyone get a bit of stage fright. We're used to images with a lot of activity to deal with. We also haven't worked on anything this graphic before. So, I think everyone let their brain get scared and shut down a bit. I think it would have helped if I had brought in a finished painting so you could see where we were heading with this image. I didn't make a ton of progress on my painting during class because I was away from the easel a lot. So, I will try to work on the painting this week so we can discuss it next week. Lessons learned: don't switch gears so abruptly (we spent a lot of time working off master paintings, and then I switched back to a photo, but one that was completely unlike any of the images we had been working on), and when doing a painting that is a style unlike anything we've dealt with before, it would be beneficial to bring in a finished painting so you can see where we're heading.

All that said, I still think everyone did a great job. We figured out the color issues, everyone did a great job convincng me that there was light coming over that hill and through the trees. There is still a lot to learn from this photo, so don't give up. You might even want to start it again and see if working through it differently gives you better/different results. Welcome back to Emily1, and welcome to Emily2. You did a great job keeping up with our craziness, and I was really impressed with your color mixing. You handled that much better than most beginners! Next week brings us to seascape. I'll go easy on you all. Promise.

Another Cezanne

Nice job on those apples, Ladies! This Cezanne has so much gorgeous pure color. What fun to paint! I really enjoyed this one, too. It was a lot of work trying to carve those forms out, though. I love the bold shadowsThat anchor these little balls of color.