At the end of the spring session of my class in June, we painted a cluster of grapes. I thought I had made a mess of the background painting, but it finally turned our all right. The grapes were going pretty good until I added the dark shadows and then they looked a bit flat. But rather than try to fix it, which might have made it worse, I called it done.
When the fall session of my class began, I started with a scene from our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes. We usually start off our first day there by walking around the Sherwin Creek Campground. For many years it was our favorite place to camp, but now we stay in a cabin at Tamarack Lodge. We love that area where desert sagebrush meets alpine forests, a place that feels very alive. I think I captured some of that feeling here even though it was done quickly and kind of sloppily. It's kind of bittersweet because I included our dog, Darby, and this was his last trip with us before he died of cancer.
Then our next class project was to paint something to use on a holiday card. I chose to try working from a photo of two of my grandkids, Makaila and Zack with the snowman that they built. I usually avoid trying to paint people, but went ahead with this anyway. It's not bad, but it doesn't look much like Makaila and Zack, and I decided not to use it for a card.
The class was still working on this project the following week, so I tried another snow scene. What I liked best about the photo that I used was the shadow of the tree on the snow. I was hoping to get that done with one quick wet on wet pass, but the blue spread too much and I went back and tried to fix it later. I still like it pretty well, but it is not what I had hoped for. I'd still like to learn how to paint wet soft edges, but so far it is way out of reach for me.
In the fall session of my class, we always do at least one scene with colorful trees. Some of the ones that we have done in the past have not interested me much, but I liked this one because the water made it more interesting. This one was fun to paint, but a bit scary at the end because after spending quite a lot of time on the trees, the success of the painting depended on the reflections which had to be done very quickly. I was lucky this time and mine came out all right. The white streaks were masked, and they may have come out better if I had lifted them out with a thirsty brush like Ron did.
Our last class project of the year was a tiger. It involved masking the tiger to paint the background, then painting the shape of the tiger and adding the stripes last. I think mine came out surprisingly good.
