Update on My Journey as an Artist

 You can tell when my weekends are so full because I don't have time to sit down and write some stories for The Crafty Girl Project!  This past weekend, I took an Acrylic Paint Workshop.  I learned SO much and Kay Powell, our instructor, was great!  To say she's a hoot is an understatement!  She teaches with tough love, i.e. slaps your face while she's hugging you!

I have a terrible problem, according to Kay.  I'm an over-blender! Acrylics can be a very forgiving medium...you don't like the way something looks, dry it and paint over -- it will not muddy the colors.  We started with learning how to mix colors.  You really only need five tubes of paint: black, white, red, blue and yellow.  All shades come from those primary colors (red, blue and yellow).  Of course, mixing can be fun but time consuming and I am a fan of premixed colors!

This piece of the shadow of the bike rider on a path in Tuscan was the last thing I painted in the workshop.  Yes, I really did paint it.  It was my interpretation of a piece that Kay had already painted.  I love the perspective in this piece that add to the dimension of the scene. 

But before we got to this, we started out with some basic forms...pears to be exact.  Kay said that she loved painting pears because they were so sensual.  Sexy pears?  I remember a girlfriend my younger brother had that we nicknamed "The Pear" and not because she was sensual...it had more to do with her tiny waist and her humongous badonkadonk!  Children can be so cruel -- ok so I was officially an adult.

Kay wanted us to paint first in only black and white. Kay, by the way, loved this little pear's butt crack! We are using a canvas pad that we have cut into 1/4s and only titanium white and mars black and whatever we can mix between the two.  Did you know that if you didn't have any black, mix the red, yellow and blue together for black?  Lucky for me I didn't forget my black.

Next we graduated into colored fruit.  Somehow my mostly green pear turned into an avocado so I'm just telling everyone that it is an avocado!  I do really like how I did the background and how the colors compliment each other.  What do you think?

Then she wanted us to think about composition and paint three pears using only the leftover paints that we had on our palettes.  It was the end of the day and she didn't want us to waste any paint!  Paint is expensive and I truly appreciate any cost cutting savings.  For this piece, she handed us all pieces of matting to paint on.  With acrylics, you really can paint on just about anything but if you are are fine art painting, you don't want to use craft acrylics.

Anyone want to buy a painting?