In our second art class, Guy St. Godard wanted us to experience two things.

Part 1 – Sketch

There was a glass jar with a cup lying down on a table in the center of the room and we were to sketch what we saw from the perspective we were sitting at. Sketching is good, because when you paint, the canvas is often the final product (because paint dries) where sketching you can practice drawing what you visually see, including all the perspectives, shadows and shades of lighting and position of the object in question. Personally, however I find it boring because I’m not really a technical type of painter and tend to be more abstract – plus, I’ve already did my sketches on previous rounds of art classes back in September 2010 and again back in January 2012.

I haven’t painted since last April 2012 and I was a little anxious to start painting. However, I do want to participate in Art Class – and watch and listen and learn – to help me become a better painter, or at least enjoy painting more often .. so I sketched! I found that I was able to sketch what I saw, in my own “HART” way, which is speed sketching! I don’t think it turned out too bad, but obvious my heart wasn’t into sketching. I could have spent more time working on my shadows and the table the objects were sitting on I guess ~

Here Is My Sketch

Part 2 – Water Colour Technique using Acrylic Paints

Like the water colour pictures in my class 22 post, Guy selected two photos that he had taken that we were going to paint in acrylic paint, but with a twist. The first picture (below) was the example for the sky for the the top 2/3’s of our painting, and there was another picture (not shown) where the bottom 1/3 of our painting was to be rolling hills. What we should be doing is making our canvas really wet at first with a clean brush and clean water and will be painting on a flat surface. Then, like water colours we do light streaks of our selected colors and let the paint kind of bleed into the water, and like a mind of its own grow into background sky! It’s quite a cool effect, and you do not do this generously but more strategically and, even swishing the canvas around to extend the colour and make it look even more “water colourish”. Then, the concept for the sky part as an example, was to paint the white canvas parts with white acrylic paint trying not to bleed into the blueish colours, but okay if it started to also blend with the watery canvas into the blue edges.

This “water colour technique” concept … seemed to work great with canvas, but unfortunately I can’t show you an example this week. I was painting on canvas BOARD and the effect was not quite as it was supposed to be. In fact, it was so terrible (or at least what I did trying this technique) that I just painted over the mess with a light blue paint and decided to scrap that idea altogether – for another time that is. So, in the meantime I thought I would just try to paint the first photograph because it had kind of a grain elevator or some type of building on the landscape that looked interesting.

I think it turned out okay 🙂

Here is the photo taken by Guy St. Godard that we used

Here is my painting

It felt good to paint once again!