I’m taking a painting class a Workhouse Art Center called “Painting to Get Loose.” There are five of us in the class and the instructor is one of the artists-in-residence at WAC. We are only two weeks into the nine-week class, but I am having so much fun!

The first week we did an exercise of painting a pitcher and apple six different ways. It was a great warm up exercise and got us experimenting with different techniques.

We also started on our first landscape painting. Below are my charcoal sketch and the work in progress – as far as I could get in the allotted class time. It is a scene from the beach adjacent to my parents’ neighborhood in Rhode Island.

Week two we did two simultaneous paintings of the same landscape. This scene is from a beach in Washington State on the Pacific Ocean.

It was a very interesting exercise to paint two canvases at once. I felt more free to mess up and try something different. We also learned about underpainting, where you paint an opposite color underneath and allow some of that color to shine through the final layer. These are still a work in progress, but I’m pleased with the turnout so far.

Here you can see the progression of the canvases in class: