June 19th

We painted at the home of Walt Gnosky. Beautiful grounds! We had a model to paint today. Here's a picture of the painting I did....

When the boxes arrive and are unpacked, I'll find my study and critique it.

We also toured Walt's studio and it was inspiring to see his work and hear of his work ethic.

Walt painted with us and then showed us his work that he completed in four hours (and we aren't talking an 8X10 inch study!)

Seeing this drummed home the importance of painting each day.

My day was average. I tried to focus on putting a value or color down and leaving it alone. There some strong areas to the painting. Kevin stood back from my painting and Ray's commenting he liked how strong the two paintings were. I struggled with the warm value in the shadow family. Kevin helped with this, mixing the color that I couldn't quite get and noting that sometimes the values around what we are struggling with may not be right and need to be adjusted.

Overall, a better day than Wednesday. In the afternoon, Kevin gave us an exercise to paint off a limited palette of colors he provided. My three colors were a grey, terra rosa, and Carmine (red). You also had White to use. This was challenging--as you picked your subject first before seeing what color you had to work with. I had chosen a little birdbath with flowers behind it. My goal was not to have a finished painting, but to learn how colors relate to one another and how I might possible get something blue from these three colors. A grey-green was basically all I could get. It wasn't a total failure. The birdbath was really nice in the painting---learned what an unattractive shadow shape I had in the painting--how the carmine could be the darkest dark--but yet warm shadow color. So it was a valuable lesson!

Thursday night was the celebration and dinner at Kevin's house. We enjoyed each other's company and shared dinner. We got to show our families just what we were striving to become--by showing them Kevin and Wanda's work. Of course, we all told them how much we wanted a studio like Kevin's!

One one day left---painting in the morning and a study to studio painting demonstration in the afternoon.