Landscape Painting with Charles Philip Brooks (Oct 4 and 5, 2014)

The art teacher I have been studying with (Melinda Borysevicz) took some time off for the summer.  This coincided with Paul and I spending almost all of our free time working on the house we bought.  Finally, the house is pretty much done, and we were able to move in.  Melinda invited artist Charles Philip Brooks in to teach a landscape class. 

In the morning, we headed out to Fort Pulaski, which is has large open areas of marsh.  I chose to do a "big sky" painting. 

I'm really pleased with how this turned out.
In the afternoon, we headed to the beach on Tybee Island to paint the ocean...

Painting a constantly-moving body of water is a real challenge, and the net result is a painting that depicts the essence of the thing, not the actual thing itself.  An awesome experience of really LOOKING at something and seeing that there is so much more to it than just a blue patch. 

I learned so much in this class, and really enjoyed it.  I have discovered that plein aire painting with oil paint is so much easier than the acrylics I was using before.  For these outings, I used my 9x12 Guerilla Painter box.  It's a nice rig, but heavy.  Fortunately, I was able to use my roller bag on most of the ground we had to cover.  The others in the class worked with French easels, and some of them had some issues with their equipment.  It seems like there is no such thing as perfect plein aire painting equipment.  I plan to continue to evaluate ways to lighten the load to make transport of the equipment less of a hassle.

Portrait Class, Weeks 4-6

For the last 3 classes, we worked on a single portrait.  This is the first weeks efforts, roughed in with just burnt sienna.

The second week, I more fully resolved the shadows with burnt sienna, and then worked on the varying tones in the light with gray tones.  Also worked on the hair.

The third and final week.  Got some real skin tone in there and more fully resolved details.  I don't consider it a "finished" painting.  There are some aspects of it that are still a little rough, but I think it came out pretty well overall.  Not too bad for a beginner, if I may say so myself.  For some reason, this final version looks much more colorful on my computer screen than it does in real life.

Portrait Class Week 3: 4/30/14

I decided to focus all my efforts on the painting this week, rather than trying to do a painting and a drawing.  No time to do much with the hair rather than just sketch in the shape of it, but my proportions are better. 

Portrait Class 4/15/14

My first portrait class.  I have drawn portraits before with charcoal, but this was my first time to paint a portrait.  First we warmed up with a drawing, practicing a loose blocking in of the facial features.

Then the exact same thing with the paint.  This is oil paint.

Considering it was just a 2.5 hour class and we had a demo in there and all, I'm quite pleased with both my drawing and painting.

Art Class 4/2/14

Color study in oil.  We had about an hour and 45 minutes to turn out a painting.  The goal was to do most of the mixing on the canvas, not on the palette.  The teacher is pushing lots of painting starts.  There isn't time to get hung up on fussy details.  I'm not crazy about how the lemon came out, but I think the sugar bowl came out pretty well.

Art Class 3/27/14

Spring classes started up again this week.  I have two weeks to attend before my new job starts on 4/7. 

Below is my very first oil painting.  White egg on a white sheet of drawing paper, put a spot light on it.  I got the oil paints a couple of years ago (right after we moved to Pennsylvania) and I finally decided to try them out.  Acrylics dry way too fast outdoors for plein air painting, so I figured I would give the oils a shot.  I really like the oil paint.  There are all kinds of things to mix into oil paint to make it do this or that.  This is just out of the tube.  It was such a joy to blend the paint to get the nice soft edges without the paint drying.