Painting Class: Landscape

I finally finished the second painting I had begun during my painting class (which you can catch up on here if you've failed to read it thus far). It took longer than planned. This was because of the previously mentioned Doctor Who piece I was working on turning out to be rather more complicated than expected. That's finished too, and I'll be posting about it early in the new year.

Once that was done there was this little festive thing that came up called Christmas (you may have experienced this particular time-sink, fun though it is) as well as some curfuffle at work. That particular thing has yet to be resolved, but looks hopeful and should be sorted out by my birthday one way or another. If you have no idea where I work or what the issue is then I won't bore you with it, and if you do know then why would I tell you again?

Anyway, I finished the painting. I expect you'd like to see it?

To be fair, it does look moderately better in the flesh (as little as that says), but I've still yet to work out how to light pieces for good photography and I need a tripod.  I have got a swanky new camera though, so that's something.  It's based on this photograph by Chamberstock 

My wife wants to hang it somewhere.  I suggested face to the wall in the lavatory, but she's picked out pride of place in the living room instead.  I really am honestly baffled why people like my stuff most of the time, but I'm thankful for it too despite feeling awkward about the compliments; one day maybe it'll make me money when I'm too old to work on videogames because the technology confuses me, as DVR's do my grandparents.

Before I go on I need to say some things about the class, which I didn't last time as I was too busy wittering on about my cats (incidentally, Christmas Trees and cats - oh what a wonderful combination that isn't).

There were 11 of us in the class of wildly varying ages (I was not the youngest, nor the oldest, but toward the younger end of the spectrum) and predominantly X chromosomes (there were two guys in the group, one of whom was yours truly).  The styles were wildly varying, but I wouldn't say that anyone was really bad, just inexperienced - much like me.  Some of the art produced there was really wonderful, varying pieces putting me in mind of Hockney, Lowry and other artists who's work I know but names I don't.  Pretty good for a bunch of amateurs.  Good company to be in.

Our instructor was Paula McCartey (not to be confused with the Beatle, who is the wrong sex for starters), who kept quiet about her body of work until the end (not that it's hard to find these days) but turned out to be a very accomplished painter of some local renown (maybe more than local, I didn't go and ask around elsewhere).  Her daughter works in the same building as me it transpires, though I have yet to meet her that I know of.  Small town, big world.

I had to miss two weeks of the class unfortunately due to illness (mine and others) so I started the painting at home since I knew the subject was to be a landscape.  My wife printed up some photo sized landscape images of my choosing, and I went with the one that appealed most at the time.  The image above is me painting, obviously.

Naturally, being me I forgot to take a picture of it after the first stage of painting, so this is after the second.  You can see at the bottom that I'd started by just roughing in lines in blue on a lighter blue field.  I wanted some of that blue to show through the finished piece, I'm not sure it really did, but it made painting the sky easier.  After that I just started painting over the top.  I think I preferred this to using pencil (as I did with the rabbit) as it was less likely to muddy the paint that went over it.

I think this was the stage I had reached when I returned to the class.  Not much else to say about it, although it went down quite well with the other artists.  Oh, no, actually I'm remembering it wrong.  The water was painted before that class, but the cliffs weren't - this is at the end of that week's class.

And this is after the final class.  The color looks really good here - this may be as a result of the better lighting in the class' work area, or it might be because of the camera - this being taken by one of the other students (Thanks Suna!). I really don't know, but I'll take it.

I could have called it quits there I guess, but I really wanted it to feel a little more golden, and my brother sugested it looked like a hairy green woman lying down in a river , looking up from her feet. Once he'd said it I could see it as little else so I spent a final couple of hours on it after Christmas adding more fall colours and fog and detail before calling it finished.

and that's the end of my adventures in Painting Class.  Unless I do another, which I probably will at some point.  I need to come up with something to paint just for myself now though - not going to improve otherwise...