Painting Class

This afternoon I had the opportunity to take a fine arts painting class.  It was something I found on groupon a while ago and finally got around to doing.  It was a "bring your own brushes" class so you brought the paintbrushes and the studio provided everything else.  The inspiration for our session was a painting by Selden Gile called Belvedere Lagoon.  Now, I certainly went into it realizing that of course my painting wouldn't look just like his,  after all, he's a professional artist and I have only dabbled in painting for fun a few times, but I was excited to go and see what I could do.

We started off the class by sketching the lines, which was a step by step process to outline all of the boats, the horizon and mountains etc.  We did this without being able to look at the painting, but instead just followed the directions of our teacher.  It was good practice and made me realize that in the future, some sketching of my intended work will help me out a lot with proportions etc.  Even so, my outlines weren't quite to the same scale as his, but the idea was to use the painting as a guide but make it our own anyways.

Then we jumped right into painting the background.  That was probably my favorite part.   One thing I'm not great at yet is blending colors so it was fun to work on the water with a variety of blue colors.   I spent quite a lot of our two and a half hour class working on the background.  Here's how it looked after I'd completed the base of all the landscaping and started in on the boats.  Again, not the same color scheme as Mr. Gile, my blues are darker and more vibrant, but I think it was starting to look good all the same. 

 After some more highlighting and work on the boats, this is as far as I made it by the end of the class.  I must admit that as I was working on it up close, I was somewhat discouraged over how it looked.  It's true that paintings improve when viewed from a distance, because once I got it home and was able to look at it from more than a foot or two away (my space in the class was back against a wall) I was pleasantly surprised that although unfinished, its not as bad as I'd thought. 

Obviously there's still much to do, since my "sails" still look like awkward blobs of white, and the background boats don't look like boats at all yet (shadows and detailing are not my forte), but I'm started to get excited at the prospect of what it might eventually become.  All in all, I'd say not bad for my first real foray into fine art.