The under painting

This is where I am at. This is my ‘under painting’ which should be giving me some clear shadows and tones but it didn’t work out because I blended too much - under the florescent light I couldn’t see much shadow so the result is a fairly bad representation. I’ll be painting over it this week so hopefully I can get things looking a bit better.

Mixing paint is like mixing icing

We took a break from our still life this week and instead began mixing colours. First was black to white with 3 shades of grey in between. We then used these to make tonal shades of blue, red and yellow then green, orange and purple. Finally we practiced mixing the colours to accurately represent the still life.

Transferring onto canvas

Once our sketch was finished we lay it face down and scribbled some charcoal on the back then gently lay it charcoal side down onto our canvas and drew over the lines with a pen thereby transferring the image to the canvas. We then got some dryish paint (oils) on the tip of a brush and produced an outline.
We only used blue and red to fill in the shading and cover all the white canvas. The paint was quite dry.

Week 3 our final sketch

We came up with our final sketch. We measured along paint brush with one eye for distance relationships to get the dimentions right. Mary explained that it was good to start off being as accurate as we could to train our eyes to see the subject matter...from there we can move on with our personal interpretations. I got some parts totally wrong and had to overlay bits of paper to redraw them.

Week 2 sketching

We practiced warm up sketching...2 minutes with a thick black pen on news print to get a feel on the shapes and depths of the still life. The pen wasnt to leave the page. We also had a go at blind drawing where we looked only at the subject and not once at our drawing.

Week 2

From week two we began working on this still life. We conferred over a tea break and told Mary what medium we preferred to work in...ummm acrylics? Turns out Mary loves oils and would have everyone use them if she had her way. I was happy to try them out but Barry really wanted to use water colours. Mary gave us a list of the items we'd need. 10% discount from her shop...but man it adds up!

Week 1

This is week One. We chose two colours and painted sheets of newsprint then painted a grid and our initials in each square. We then were split into two groups and had to confer with each other to arrange all our pictures on the floor in an artistic way and present our installation to our audience (the other group). My feeling on this first day was ' wow, I'm actually doing it...i'm actually painting again'.

I'm free!

I am free! I have finally finished all my extra contract tedious I-hate-it work and have passed the test by declining further work when asked under duress. Is that the right word? It was a desperate plea from my old boss who is under pressure and who, I have just discovered, is about to run for council . Hard as it was I have to be strong so the answer was a pathetically apologetic NO.
So anyway enough of that, I am very excited to be going to an art class again. Mary Archibald is my tutor and hubby Barry has joined me for the ride. My plan was to post a picture of each week's achievement but the first term is almost over already so I'm going to post the whole term's class which was all pretty much focused on producing an accurate (as can be) still life for the purpose of learning to see what we are painting before moving on to more expressive stuff and personal preferences.