That’s me, KGB! Working on my homework for Suzi Blu’s awesome workshop. It’s only the first week, but we’ve already had a couple of videos and PDF files, plus a bunch of homework. All of the course content has been really well done; Suzi did a fantastic job! If you want to learn how to draw pretty girls, this is the class for you.

I love that we’re getting right down to it, practicing faces and eyes and poses rather than going through all of the rules of drawing, perspective and so on. Instead of learning tons of theory and then trying to figure out how to apply that knowledge to the subject matter you want to draw or paint, we’re starting right from drawing what WE want to draw – pretty girls. hehe

I uploaded some of my homework sketches to my Flickr, as well as the Flickr group for the class. Feel free to add me as a contact and as your Ning friend too!

My painting class at Emily Carr ended today, but just as one class ends another one is beginning – and this one’s online!

The lovely Miss Suzi Blu is doing her first online workshop. I stumbled onto her YouTube videos earlier in the year and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. She’s so inspiring and has a wonderful playful attitude that makes creating art seem fun again, not scary or intimidating. And for only $55? How can you go wrong?

You can check out her community on Ning here. Then don’t forget to add aCageyBee as a friend!

It was with a sniff that I walked out of my last painting class this afternoon; it has been such an incredible experience for me. I’ve learned so much in these few short weeks, met some cool people and just generally felt alive, inspired, happy.

With most things I’m quite content to be self-taught, making good use of the library and the internet. I’m pretty good at deconstructing things, figuring out how stuff works on my own, so I wasn’t sure that a painting class would be the best (or at least the fastest) way to improve my painting skill versus simply getting out the paints and having at ‘er. But after this class, I’m totally changing my tune. It would’ve taken me years of trial and error, plus many expensive trips to the art supply store to randomly test out materials, to figure out on my own what I’ve learned in this class. Things like using medium or gel, how colors work together, composition…these are all things I might have eventually figured out, but it would’ve been a lot of “This painting doesn’t look quite right, but I don’t know why.” Lame.

I mentioned before that our assignment was to create a painting from the collage we made last class and though I’m still not quite finished, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Another benefit of the class was getting critique of my homework and this was especially true today as we all had to hang up our work (some or all) so the entire class could see what everyone else had created. It was one of those gut wrenching moments to have my work critiqued by the rest of the class, but obviously a good and necessary experience for me to grow as an artist.

It was fascinating to see how different all of the work was even though we were all using the exact same color palette, had the same instructions and often had the same subject matter. One guy had the most vibrant beautiful greens in all of his paintings and another woman kept returning to purples and yellows. All so unique despite the fact that we all worked from just 8 colors. Amazing!

I’ve been on a bit of a comic book kick lately when painting stuff outside of class. I love the really graphic bold lines of comic book art and thought it would be good practice for me to play with a totally different style of painting than what I normally do. I did this reproduction of a painting from one of my all time favorite TV shows, Heroes, a few weeks ago. You can see the original “painting” from the show here.

Unfortunately, this was before I’d learned all about medium and gel. It would be sooooo much easier to do now that I’ve picked up some glossy gel! A few coats of glaze mixed with black? Much easier than watering down my acrylics so much so that the paper is rippled and warped even though it’s taped down to a board! If I learn nothing else during the rest of my class, it will have been well worth the cost just for discovering medium. Love it!

Next up on my hero exploration was a birthday gift for one of my longtime friends, Hoops. He’s a big comic book fan and with all the summer fandemonium over the new Ironman movie, I decided trying to paint the poster from the movie would be perfect for him.

Initially I thought the poster would be good since it’s got such simple lines and doesn’t look too cartoony; I can see it hanging on a wall without looking like a kid’s bedroom. What I didn’t take into account is how hard it is to paint in that style. I used so many layers of glaze trying to get a good metal effect, trying to get the whitish blue glow from the eyes. I kept going back over it, waiting for it to dry, doing a few more layers, then going back and redoing the details AGAIN. I have no idea how long it took me to finally finish since I spread it out over 3 or 4 sessions. Phew!

I bought some new paint for this project too – Stevenson’s gold. That was definitely a big help and lots of fun to play with. All in all I think the painting turned out well and the birthday boy was happy, so it was worth the many hours it took to finish.

I uploaded a shot of the finished painting to my Flickr, but it’s not a great respresentation since the room was so dark and I needed to use flash. I really need to get some better lighting in here. In real life the painting is much darker overall and the gold looks like real gold. The wall it’s hanging on IS green though, so the rest of the colors aren’t shifted too much.

Gah!  Sunday is my last class; I can’t believe how quickly the summer has flown by!  I’ve learned so much and thoroughly enjoyed each of my painting classes.  This is the first course I’ve ever taken where not only did I never miss a class, but it didn’t cross my mind to WANT to skip a class.  I’m really going to miss my Sunday afternoon ritual of riding my bike along the seawall, then spending the day painting.

Fortunately, as summer winds to an end the fall classes are ramping up.  My lovely parents are going to help out and I’ll be taking two classes in September: Drawing Fundamentals and Basics of Composition and Form.  They’re both core classes for the Fine Art Techniques Certificate program.  Might not be the most exciting classes, but important ones, I think.

Homework for the final class is a painting on the largest scale we’ve done – a sheet of thick paper around 14 X 20.  In class we created a smaller thumbnail version by cutting out images from magazines.  We created this collage keeping in mind the lessons from our previous classes: considering our use of color, unity, focal planes and perspective, composition, eventual brush strokes.  We’re free to make changes in the final painting, of course, but it was helpful to be able to play around with the placement of objects before actually painting them.  My original idea didn’t work at all once I had it down on paper, but since it was just the thumbnail planning stage, I could move my collage pieces around until I had something that worked.

I’ll have to snap some pics of the thumbnail plus what I’ve got so far on the big painting.  I haven’t finished it yet, but I think some shots along the way would be interesting too.  I’ll keep you posted!