March 2017

Last May, and then again in October, we went to four-day riding and training clinics with our favorite horse expert, Chris Ellsworth. They took place at our friend Jody's place near Placerville, and Jody let us stay in her house there. She has become a good friend, and we see her nearly every day because she has two horses boarded at the same place as ours, and Rocky, her Tennessee Walker shares a pen with our horse, Zim. Rocky is a very friendly horse, and I enjoy seeing him whenever I go to get Zim. Jody has done plenty of nice things for us, so I did this painting of Rocky to give to her.

In my painting class, I spent a day working on my painting of Rocky instead of the class project, which was a little kitten peeking through a hole in a concrete wall. Then last week, I would have started on the kitten, but Ron had put out copies of a photo of some flowers to be used for next week's project, a fast, loose painting. Ron doesn't mind if we don't follow his schedule, so I went ahead and painted the flowers a week early. I spent about an hour on this, and I think it came out pretty good, considering the time spent.

February 2017

The first class project of the winter session was a lake at sunset with snow all around. I don't know where Ron got the photo or where it was taken, but it was a pretty scene, and I enjoyed painting it. In his demonstration, Ron masked out the snow, but I didn't, and found it fairly easy to paint around it. He likes to use a lot of masking, and I think it is partly because it makes things a bit easier for less experienced students. I find that I am not very good at masking, and I would rather not use it. When I started this painting with the sky and its reflection, I thought I had made a complete mess of it, but when I had done the rest, it looked pretty good. One thing I did different from Ron and the rest of the class was to add a blue cast to the snow, making my painting look colder than theirs. I like it that way. I feel that this scene should look kind of cold.

Next, we did a still life of apples from a photo by Ron. Once again, he used masking for the apples, but I didn't feel that they needed it. I just used it for a few white spots to make the apples look shiny. I think I did a pretty good job with this one.

Then we did a lion. I did use masking on this one to make it easier to paint the background as a formless wet wash. But then I didn't like my formless wash. I wanted it darker and with a bit more form to it, so I added a bunch more vegetation. I still didn't like it very much, but several people around me commented on how they liked it, so I continued on with the lion, and it turned out better than I expected.