Acrylics 101: Shading

 Welcome to the Craft Guild of Dallas!! 

I was all set, with my big bag of supplies, and after a small adventure of trying to find the place (turns out it's near the Social House), the butterflies in my stomach started fluttering. I was really doing this! Squee!! :) When I walked into the classroom I discovered there were only two of us signed up. Sweet, personal attention! Ms. L is our instructor and Mrs. C is a sweet old lady in her early 70's who has taken multiple classes before, but this was her first in acrylics.

We jumped right into creating a color wheel and discussed why we do not use black paint (apparently burnt umber and blue do just fine, thank you very much) since black is rarely seen in real life. Then we played with different shades of color, adding white, then adding burnt sienna to create darker shades. Thoroughly enjoying this part, I got into blending the colors together creating a visual tool of basic colors and their shades. My green shades were a bit muddy, but like Ms. L says, it's not about the result it is about the experience!

I also learned a bit of composition, with a quick lesson on the rule of thirds and why odd numbers are visually appealing and centering anything on the canvas is not. Time was just flying by and before I knew it we were at our last half hour of class, painting a few pears from a photocopy. And... Go! Ack!! I have to admit, this is where I felt like a total amateur. Ms. L asked us to change things up a bit, and not paint exactly what we saw; here I struggled. It was difficult to envision the shadows of my pears compared to the ones on the photocopy. Mrs. C did a pretty good job with hers, and since it was the last task of the day, sadly I felt a little defeated by comparison. I had expectations upon myself, and I felt a little lost. I didn't really grasp the technique of painting shadows, and in the end I would have felt better had I just painted what I saw rather than trying to "do something different" and then create a light source for my imaginary pears.

Feast your eyes on that lovely color wheel! (Ignore the pears, heh)

There you have it, my friends, one down and seven to go. Homework is to find two Matisse paintings and we will try to replicate them next week. Maybe if I am lucky, she will let us paint from an O'Keefe. :)