Finished the second day in the class with Brenda Sylvia. I was exhausted. I had forgotten what it was like to really work hard to push my brain out of it’s comfort zone. But I had so much fun and learned a lot about why sometimes it is best for me to just look away from the subject at some point and paint the painting. Brenda is actually not teaching that, but strongly encouraging everyone to learn to deeply SEE into the local colors. In my case, this is very important because while I have often managed this pretty well with the pastels (especially with portraits), I’ve not been very successful with paint. One real advantage I can see with the acrylic paint now, IS that fast drying time and I had a good time pushing colors back and forth in a way that is not unlike what I do with the pastels sometimes. And acrylic paint really does dry much darker than you think it will, so I found I had to keep pulling it back up into a higher key.

However, using a very bright ground, in this case, cadmium red straight out of the tube, ended up being quite eye popping. And I think I did a better job of preserving that ground in my edge work this time.

She also had us do a color sampling board which also had a space for playing with different brush shapes and types.

And I’ve met some delightful artists in this class!

I forgot to take a photo of my color sampler board but will do that today and add it to this post. But in the meantime, here is my painting from yesterday. I obviously did not worry about the drawing but focused on getting an interesting composition and the color. The finished painting is followed by a couple of progress shots. You can see I made some changes to things in the composition in the end. I’m still getting used to the larger format with the big brushes.