Learning

I’ve been thinking about taking an oil painting class through the local junior college for several years now, but I never had the time and had a difficult time justifying the cost. And then I realized that I actually do have the time now, and I have a savings account set up specifically for art related expenses. Also, the class is being held just up the street from me and just about couldn’t be any more convenient. So two days before the class started, I signed up.

I was right about the expense. Oh boy, but it’s fine. Although I still have only three tubes of paint, because it will be a few weeks before we start adding any color. At least now I have many of the basic supplies I need to continue painting for the next few years. (Not counting consumables like paint, medium, and surfaces.) We’ll be using a grid to transfer our chosen reference images to the canvas and then painting a grisaille before we add the color and the entire process will last bout eight weeks. I don’t know that it will be the process I’ll end up using, but having a process to start with is exactly what I was hoping for, and I’ll have feedback and help along the way.

But given how much I’ve been ruminating on painting the last week, it didn’t surprise me that I ended up messing about with my water mixable oils again. Only this time I worked in quite a different way. I had a weird color background that I’d set up, and when I found myself with some left over gesso on a brush, I used it on the orange to carve out the rough shape of a head in profile, entirely from imagination. No reference photos were used at all. Tonight I went in and added the interior details and a different background color to help control the final shape. For some reason, that approach worked much better for me than trying to paint in lines. Clearly when I’m messing about with paint, I need to think edges, not lines.