Classroom demonstrations

I just finished teaching my “Painting with a Broad Brush” class. Always a lot of fun. My landscape painting class begins in five weeks and anybody can sign up for it by going to the Glendale YMCA for more details.

These are two of the more successful exercises that came from that class. The first is of the little girl. In this exercise, I limited both their brush size and their color pallette. I asked them to bring back photos of portraits from which to paint, and we had to create our paintings using only five colors: Cadmium Red Medium, Ultramarine Blue, Yellow Ocher, Burnt Umber, and White. No detail brushes were allowed. I wanted them to break free from focusing on the detail that is inherent with portraits, and to instead look for the larger shape areas, scumbling them in with a wide, flat brush.

The second painting, of the peppers, was a still life project–real peppers were used for this painting. All colors and brushes were allowed in this particular project.

The challenge with this and all paintings worked on in this class is the time frame. It’s only an hour and a half class. For the girl painting, I did take it home to work on it a little bit, but I still limited my total time painting to 3 hours. The peppers, being a still life, had to be finished in the hour and a half.