willow charcoal

Our first task was to draw our subject in willow charcoal to get to know it. I have doted over this picture for the past 3 years so I knew it pretty well already. I was trying to cheat by using a kind of light grid when Mary showed us all how to legitimately grid our work. Ye ha. With the guidelines of small little rectangles to work within I managed to get the proportions right and was quite happy with the result. I put the blue in as per my idea of plain backgrounds and to define the outline of gorgeous little Sethypoo :-)

Finally - a subject we choose ourselves

I figured that if I was going to be working on one painting for the rest of the term, I would pick a subject I love. This is a photo of my grandson Seth, taken when he was just a few month's old by his mother on her cell phone. I just LOVE this photo so decided this is what I would paint.

Close up of the McIntyre copy

Sorry Peter

More icing

We did some more mixing of colours to get to know our paints. My initial thoughts were that this was a waste of time and paper but it’s a very therapeutic activity and I enjoyed the night :-)
I was also a little surprised that some students really didn't understand what we were doing and were doing random mixes in the hope that they got the right colour in the end. It showed me that all the 'non-art' years behind me probably in fact included a fair amount of practice and training as I find mixing colours second nature, almost instinctive. I can see a colour and generally know exactly what pigments and how much to get that colour.
Nice

First week of second term

This was our first week back and we had some new faces in class - Barry didn't join me this term. He really wants to do technical drawings and so the nature of this art class didn't suit.
To get us back in mode (since most of us don't get time to practice outside of class) we practiced drawing from a photocopy of one of Peter McIntyre's paintings. Once we had a bit of this, she got us to draw on each other's work - we rotated around each easel and worked away for 5 minutes or so before moving onto the next. It was kind of interesting and kind of frustrating but also liberating as we revealed that most of us were less worried about the end result so we were more relaxed.
The final result kind of looked good if you didn't look too closely!

Plain background

I wanted to do a plain background on my still life a bit like a painting I saw by Michael Smither. I couldn't find a copy of it online but this one is by Mark Olsen which is a similar concept.
Mary instead pursuaded me to use the greeny yellow leaves that I ripped out of a magazine as inspriation but I don't like the result. I have to decided now if I want to finish my first painting or paint the whole thing white and reuse the canvas. I didn't like the subject matter and would never put this up on the wall so I think that's my answer - I can keep the photos for prosperity!

Last week of term 1

Well my plan to regularly update this blog isn't panning out so well. At least I have been faithful in keeping up with my classes and taking photos.
In my last class of term 1 I managed to put some more tone into my painting of the bottles and jars but ran out of time to finish so this is the part I am most pleased with.